Collins Does Afghanistan 2013-2014

What do you think?
I could use coir matting but im not happy with it to be honest, not tall enough.
Here I have taken a soft bristle brush and cut it down and used hot glue to create a new bottom.
I need to decide whether a circular bunch or a line would be best to represent the wheat.

It’s not all about mastiffs and foxhounds. Sometimes you’re just one man needing to get somewhere, or move some supplies around the place, for that you can just use a trusty quad bike.

The paint jobs for these were the same as all the other vehicles and men so there is no point in me going through that again! It did however mean i could finish off the top cover for the mastiffs and take some decent pictures.

White Dragon Miniatures have just released their new Mastiff 2 model and when I first saw it I promised myself one, or two, because lets face it, everything works in a minimum of a pair.

Above are a few stock pictures from a quick google search. You can see lots of footage of Mastiffs doing their thing on YouTube too.

So! To building and painting!

what you’ll need:

• knife
• superglue
• bowl of warm soapy water
• Primer (i used white)
• Zandri dust
• karak stone
• Screaming skull
• agrax earthshade
• nuln oil
• lahmium medium
• cadian fleshtone
• boltgun metal
• mechanicus standard grey

WDM recommend that you wash their models before use due the use of mold release.

I used an electric toothbrush and warm soapy water. It wasn’t enough, my primer didn’t adhere as well as i would like, i had to do a repair to paintwork at the end, more on that later.

I thought i was being smart but i guess I should have used a cloth or something similar as well.

The other thing to note is that you cant build and then paint this model. It needs to be part built, then painted then the bar armour glued on and rear mounted cameras and the wing mirrors added on last.

Below I’ll go through the steps with the left vehicle being the current and the right being the previous. Quite convenient because you can see before/after images.

Due to some miscasting I was kindly sent replacements by white dragon minis so I also got some extra fresh ones. I decided to paint another batch of multi cam and tie it into finishing the Foxhound. Exciting times! Also, lets break out the magnets so that i can store it easily without breaking the generals.

Painting the TV crew wasn’t hard to be fair. Most of the clothing Ross Kemp wears in his documentary is civilian accessible ‘tactical’ clothing, I think he has some 5.11 tactec trousers, mostly because they look the same as some trousers I have.

Started off by priming white then airbrushing everything flayed one flesh. The clothing was then sepia washed and highlighted back up.

The body armour was painted Caledor sky and then wash draconhoff nightshade and highlighted back up.

The black was simply the grey contrast paint.

The skin tones were the standard mix of Cadian fleshtone, Kislev flesh and bugmans glow with reikland fleshshade.

easy peasy

So with the models all painted up, the terrain made its time to talk rulesets.

There are quite a few out there to choose from. Spectre, Force on Force, Skirmish Sangin etc. The first one that id heard of was Spectre, it struck me as more special forces type game and not a ‘standard infantry’ game. The next I found was  Skirmish Sangin, which I played a number of games of and found quite interesting. Finally my friend kindly gave me a copy of Force on Force. im told its a cracking rule set but I haven’t read it fully or played a game yet so will reserve comment now.

I downloaded a copy of skirmish sangin and read through it a few times whilst on holiday.

D100 result system, interesting, different, very granular, the way RPGs blow shit up is fantastic but by god, what an awful book layout.

When reading through, perfect, no problems all seems to make sense. but when you play a game all of it suddenly finding the rule for the situation you’re in is impossible.

the contents page doesn’t seem to match the content, the titles and subtitles definitely don’t match what rules are near them. It’s a disaster of editing, almost like they forgot that you would want to refer to it when playing the game and want to have the rule/situation to hand/nailed within a minute of searching.  The saving grace is the quick reference charts.

Please let me know if i’m not the only one that thinks this as everyone else has nothing but praise for the game/publisher…. I guess I must just be stupid

When the Taliban realised it wasn’t going to be able to defeat a professional standing army in a stand up fight it reverted to a guerrilla tactics and employed IEDs. After a number of tragedies involving Snatch Land Rovers on patrols the MOD purchased a new bread of Protected Patrol Vehicles.

The smallest of this new family was the Ocelot that the MOD renamed ‘Foxhound‘.

White Dragon Miniatures have a cracking model for the foxhound which can be modelled with the top buttoned up or with up to two soldiers manning GPMGs.

Starting from Zandri Dust I washed the whole thing in agrax and then drybrushed the vehicle in sections.

The camo net area I drybrushed karak and then screaming skull. The metal/composite parts of the vehicle also got given a minor dry brush of cadian flesh tone to ‘British pinky up’ a little bit. A throwback to the old SAS pinky WMIKs

As you can see I’ve not painted the top cover yet. They will be done when I next paint the remaining infantrymen.

Having found the models and the desire to play a game I was acutely aware that the terrain I had immediate access to at home or at my FLGS was not wholly suited to Afghanistan. Sure they have some desert mats and Male a battlefield in the box oasis but really it was all suited to 40K and other futuristic games. Great if you want to play those, not so good if you’re like me and enjoy the visual spectacle more than the actual gameplay.

I have the luxury of having a 3D printer (Prusa i3Mk3) that has proven to be very good at knocking out terrain (see my Star Wars projects)

I went looking for war I thought were decent files. I have quickly learnt that to have truly decent files you need to compensate the artist. Aka, pay for the files! stop being cheap, and cough up the few £ these people ask for.

That doesn’t mean however that you shouldn’t go looking for free or cheap ones! some are perfectly adequate for your needs. For example, this modular arabic style building is a freebie for you to test print and then decide whether you want to buy the rest.

I downloaded it and did a print, was very happy with it and happily parted with my money for the rest of the village files.

I have also considered buying these big sets of files, but from the pictures I feel that they’re nowhere near as detailed as the ones mentioned above and aren’t happy to take a £65 gamble at the moment.

That paint scheme for the buildings was quite simple.

Base in Coastline, dry brush Ahoy and then wash Soft Hessian.

To detail or rather weather I mixed an amount of brown and green paint and dabbed wash into the bottoms, corners and stairs.

The most important step I feel was green/brown. Made a lot of different to the ‘lived in look’

I didn’t do an awful lot of research for this. mostly watched Ross Kemp on youtube and went on Pinterest and then Google Earth.

the terrain seems to change quite quickly out there. luscious fields of the green belt immediately changes to barren wastes as soon as the irrigation ditch stops. The houses are mud brick, sparsely equipped and allegedly quite bulletproof.

I didn’t take pictures of the steps for each man. I simply batch painted the lot.

I also painted a lot of Taliban in quick succession too. Their paint scheme was mostly tans and bland colours until I did a bit of a google search for Afghan civilians and discovered that there are a lot of pictures of brightly coloured clothing too.

I remember hearing about the Taliban exploiting poor locals and playing them $10 to take up arms for the day and go attack ISAF. Whether this was a regular occurrence I don’t know but I decided to put some colourful clothing into the ranks to represent these ‘ten dollar tali’s’

The weapon options for the range are good for such a small range at the moment.

The Taliban come sporting:

• AK-47
• PKM
• RPG
• SVD
• Double Barrelled Shotgun
• Revolver

The British return fire with:

• SA-80
• SA-80UGL
• MiniMi
• GPMG
• L129A1
• Combat Shotgun
• Glock

There is plenty there on both sides to have a good scrap.

On OTT we all got together and found a way to go about it.

You’ll need the following paints

• Baneblade Brown
• Nurgling Green
• Gorthor Brown
• Dryad Bark
• Waagh Green
• Flayed One Flesh
• Athonian Camoshade
• Nuln Oil

It’s at this stage that the pattern comes to life. The key part of the scheme that’s recognisable is the off white colour. But its still really harsh and needs binding together.

• A very light wash of Athonian Camoshade (perhaps more a glaze)
• Then you have to manually go in and pin wash areas with Nuln Oil to highlight things like pockets, body armour overlaps, helmet nets etc.

If you look at the leg pockets helmet detail and the ‘battle nappy’ body armour section you can see the pin-wash is an absolutely key part of the process.

It breaks up the overall view down into its different sections, I guess this is the ‘breaking the camouflage’ that you always hear about.

So painting camo was never my strong point. I have usually shied away from it because I don’t understand how to do it or give it some depth. I’ve seen some people do amazing work with things like SS oakleaf or peadot camo and though, ‘man, I wish I could do that’ and completely disheartened to hear ‘oh its easy, you just do xyz, blah blah blah, thingy whatsit and then bam, you’re done’.

Multicam is the same, its so many different shades of colour and there are actually a large number of variations. Only one true Multicam and then a lot of similar knockoffs that people use when they don’t want to pay for the license, for example, the British who made MTP instead which is based on Multicam. They do still appear to use a lot of licensed Multicam however

Now when I first painted the first model from this range I followed this guide.

I felt that the result came out far too green! other OTTers agreed with me too. so on we went to find another way! thankfully the painting god/demon/powerhouse suetoniuspaullinus was on hand to guide us all through it all. more on that later.

I have not tried this method as it was released after I painted my models and chose my colour scheme with the OTTers.

Please try it though as its much nicer browner colour than the spectre green Multicam scheme.

I saw the miniatures from White Dragon Miniatures at Salute a few years ago and thought, ‘Hmm, they’re cool’ but didn’t know anything about modern wargaming or even a conflict that has happened in my lifetime where had I chosen to, could have been part of and as they say, nobody almost joined up. But what I did do is almost drop my whole salute budget on some models that I didn’t need, knew nothing about and didn’t even know the options for games out there.

My period of history interest had always been WW2, carried out a lot of research into it for my other hobby and I’ve got a couple of forces for Bolt Action or rather Chain of Command as I feel it suits what I want out of a game a bit more.

This new model problem left me with some conundrums to solve

1. find a game
2. find some terrain
3. paint the models
4. multicam…shit…how do i paint that!?!?!
5. find some cool reference photos for all the above

Now I have no idea if those images are actually from Afghan or even the time period I’m in with the models but still, im guessing yes? ish?

I got the from the Ministry of Defence photo gallery