28mm Dutch Marines Review

Yesterday a friend of mine brought in a few packs of May 40's new 28mm Dutch Marines. He picked them up for me at a local gameshow. I got a full squad of Marines(12), a set of three marine officers and a small separate three man Lewis team, aptly named the Rotterdam Team, for their poses where inspired by a locally famous painting of the Marines defending Rotterdam against the Germans.

Even though I have slightly to many projects going at the moment, I couldn't resist opening theblacks up. The Marine squad contains a mix of 12 different Marines in battledress and in long coats. One Lewis Gunner and a sergeant are included. The quality of the sculpts is very fine, and only a little flash. The detailing is excellent, the rifles have clearly sculpted bolts and even the anchors on the helmets are clearly visible. The quality of my tablet's camera don't do the models justice.

The size of the models is just a fraction larger than the warlord games plastics (even back than the Dutchie's were taller☺), but right on par with most metal ww2 ranges, and they blend in nicely on the battlefield with my BTD early war Germans and fallschirmjager. Because of May 40's attention to detail there really is only one flaw to find, and that is more of a personal taste: the helmets on a few of the models seem to sit somewhat high on their heads, which can look a bit funny to me at times. I'm really looking forward to painting these miniatures up, and fielding them in a few Rotterdam skirmishes against some of my disembarking German luftlande division.

28mm Dutch farm

Recently I purchased Sarissa's Dutch farm as a terrain piece for my early war Dutch and fallschirmjager to fight over. I'm pleasantly surprised by the kit. It's only the second lasered MDF kit I ever bought, but putting it together was rather easy, and the fit is excellent.

It consists out of a single ground floor, decided into two sections, two upper floors (no stairwell), and two roof sections. If you want great interior detailing you'll have to add some, but if like me, your main interest is a sectioned building suitable for bolt action, the structure is spot on. The size off the kit possitively surprised me, almost completely covering an A4 sheet.

After a quick fur brown spray painting was quick. Not entirely satisfied with the result though, so I'll add some more detailing later. The cardboard shutters fit reasonably well but don't paint up very good, I'd like to have seen them in MDF as well.

Tyrants Legion under construction

After much deliberation and a chance encounter in our hobby room with a the recent killteam box containing a full plastic tactical squad, I settled on building my centurions out of these parts. I also came up with just enough resin industrial/rubble bases to base my fledgeling Tyrants Legion on them. To make the process of building a new army manageable, I decided to go build and paint them in 500 put blocks.

Presented below is the first block; an imperial guard HQ command with meltagun and lascannon(not pictured), a ten men infantry squad with flamer and missile launcher (the tyrant guard combined marine and guard elements, I wanted the guardsmen to emulate Marines by carrying their signature weapons) a Chimera armoured transport and a single marine centurion. Since the marine codex doesn't allow veteran sergeants as independent characters , the only option is to make him a techmarine.

The guardsmen where painted a decade ago and have him surviving in a plastic bag ever since, so are in need of some touching up and adding some tyrant legion colours.

Revival!!!

A second attempt to revive my blog, mainly because it's an efficient way of sharing project progress. Currently running projects include, but aren't limited to, 28mm bolt action Prinses Irene brigade carrier patrol section, adeptus mechanicus guard army, 15mm bolt action and joining in a 2nb edition 40k Badab war campaign.

The latter project has had me scrounging through my stores, looking for suitable models. I'm aiming to build a 1500 pnts Tyrants Legion; an attempt by Lufgt Huron to rebuild the Imperial Army of old. I've selected my partially painted platoon of cadian shock troops to form the core of my army, supported by a handfull of Astral Claw marines. I'm still in doubt as to which models to use for the marines.

To do list for 2014

Last week I had vacation and spend some time rummaging through our attic. I came across quite a number of unfinished armies. Thus I decided to see if I could spend some time finishing them. These armies are currently on my to do list ( apart from finishing my 40k chaos, guard, wfb dwarves and high elves and bolt action germans and rusians). I guess my lack of focus is clearly showing...

-15mm flames of war mid war english infantry company plus support

- 10mm thirty years war catholic army for field of glory

- 15 mm ak47 rhodesia clone plus legion etrangere para troops

- 15 mm deamonworld orcs and goblins for our homebrew sets or vis magica

- 20 mm ww2 early war scotish infantry platoon for baps or chain of command

- 28mm acw confederate and union armies for brother against brother

High Elves, loads of 'em

When the new high elf armybook came out last year, I took my elves down from the attick and sorted them out and took some pictures: they covered the entire livingroom carpet...over 500 metal GW miniatures....maybe there is such a thing as to much mini's? Now all I need to do is settle on a simple paint scheme and arrange an early retirement to paint these models.....

Flight of the Intruder

When the ork flyers came out, I noticed that they looked less 'orky' than I expected, and that with a little love and DIY, they could make a very reasonable imperial ground attack fighter craft. below some foto's of my current work-in-progress Imperial Guard Vendetta-without-transport-capacity.
 

For the build I used the pilots and their seats from my Valhallan Valkyrie. Since I painted it's widows an oily brown, I had noneed to put them in the Valkyrie. The lascannon heads originate from a number of cadian heavy weapon team sprues. Other than  cutting and filing some ork-bits of not much more needed to be done. All that remains is to make the cockpit windscreen fit properly.

Finishing Armies: setting a goal

As mentioned before I'm in the process of trying to finish my 40k armies. Both my Valhallans and my Hollanders (Mordian/Praetorians) are almost done. The Valhallan army is now at 1500 points, but I want to paint just a few more models so I can swap out Marbo's Valhallan Comrade for a normal special weapons team.  Below a pic of my painted Valhallans in pre-battle manouvres formation (eg on a kitchen cutting-board)

For my Hollanders (I should arrange them in the garden one time and shoot some pics) I need to paint a handfull of command models, three sanctioned psykers and finish converting and painting three Ogryns.

My Chaos marine just got a boost form the Dark Vengeance box, so as long as I haven't found anybody to swap my dark Angel marines with, that leaves me with 6 chosen, a hellbrute, 20 cultists and 8 possessed to paint.

I'm going to try to paint all the above before the end of the year. That may not seem very ambitious, but in between work, wife, kid, house, other hobbies and sleep, time to paint is scarce. I'll start keeping count once I figure out how to put a score counter on this Blog....

Dark Vengeance

Almost a month since my last post. Vacation and a dying PC does that to you apparently. This week I bought the new 40k basic set. Mostly because it contains the small rulebook so you don't have to lug the 2,5 kg tome around every time you want to play the game. But also because of the chaos space marine models. And boy are they something.

I'd seen the pictures floating around on Warseer and Faeit, and they look nice on the sprue, but only once they are assembled you get to really appreciate the amount of detail and posing of the models, which is absolutely fantastic. I think these are the best models ever put in a starter set by GW.  I've started to assemble them, and once i get around to painting them I'll post a couple of pics. for now you'll have to do with these (the pics don't do the mini's justice, I just wanted to show you I'm assembling them to give me a reason to continue working on them);

Cultists assembled

The hellbrute assembled

Chosen, to be used as champion(s).