Finishing off British forces in the Mediterranean

Some of the stuff featured in this post has been on my painting table (actually, in the cupboard) part finished for a few years. I did a little bit of work on them a few months ago, but have decided to crack on and get them finished. I've had a weekend of finishing things off, partly inspired by the new range of Greek miniatures that Great Escape Games are about to launch. I've already got a platoon of Greek Mountain Infantry, plus plenty of support weapons including a pair of CV-35 tankettes, but inevitably I'll end up with some of the new range when they become available.

I finished off basing all my Greeks, plus some Gebirgsjager and some British infantry yesterday.

The stuff from the cupboard includes 3 x Bren carriers, which are actually finished except for painting the crews, a pair of A13 Cruisers and a pair of Vickers Light Tanks MkVI. The idea is to use them for scenarios set in North Africa, Sicily, Greece and perhaps even Italy.

I tried out the Caunter camo scheme on the carriers first of all because they had fewer lumps and bumps that needed masking prior to spraying with the airbrush.

I then made a start on applying Caunter to the A13s, but then put them down again a few months ago after getting this far.

The paints are Vallejo Model Air and come from a set called British Caunter Colors. The base colour is 71.288 Portland Stone, the lighter green is 71.401 Silver Grey and the dark green is 71.012 Dark Green.

I masked off another section and applied another thick stripe of Silver Grey today. One trick that I have learnt when applying the masking tape (well, two tips) is to stick the masking tape to your trousers a few times to take a lot of the stickiness out of it, otherwise it sticks to the paint too well, which brings me onto tip #2. When removing the tape, pull it as gently as you can and go as slowly as you can, otherwise it will pull off flakes of the base coat.

This thicker light green stripe is going to have another dark green stripe painted inside it, but I need to leave this one to dry for several days, otherwise risk pulling parts of it with the next application of masking tape.

The other tanks that I will make a start on finishing(!) are a pair of Vickers Mk.VIb's. I had got as far as painting on the base colour, which I think is Vallejo Model Color Iraqi Sand. I'm not 100% sure what I am going to do with them yet, but definitely not Caunter because of the difficulty of masking all the various panels.

All of the models featured in this post are made by Blitzkrieg Miniatures.