43rd Wessex Division Tommies

I am beginning to think my 20mm WWI Germans are cursed, after dropping one into the tin of dip, the matt varnish spray went terribly wrong and ended up with 30 odd figures being covered in a layer of foggy varnish. Fortunately I recalled they might be able to be rescued by applying gloss varnish straight away and that seems to have saved them (though now they are back being as glossy as when they were dipped). I hope to get a new tin of varnish and might wait for a slightly warmer day to spray them again.

So, as there are no new figures to show off (Burgundians 95% finished, just the snow to add), I've dug out some samples of my 36mm (1/48th) North Star WW2 British, painted up as 43rd Wessex Division for a Normandy based Project X Weird War 2 game back in 2004.

This is a bit 'olde worlde' painting style from me, being enamels over a white undercoat, but I still like them. The figures were sculpted by Richard Ansell and are really nice models and a joy to paint. Also despite being appreciably higher than 28mm, they took up no more space (mounted on the same 2p coins I used to use for 28mm) and are more anatomically correct.

The range no longer seems to be available which is a helluva shame as the scale has a lot going for it, most notably the wide range of 1/48th scale models from the likes of Tamiya.

I painted up a platoon of Tommies for the game but for some reason ended up short one no.2 for a Bren gun. Normally I wouldn't worry too much and just draft in some odd soldier, but Richard had raised the bar by having the no.2's carry a wonder spare barrel bag, so I forced myself to dig out the Green Stuff and have a crack at sculpting one on one of the riflemen - can you tell which one is the cast model and which one the converted? :-)

Hopefully Burgundians tomorrow...