Crete Diorama

After experimenting with building some olive trees this weekend for the Crete-themed table (and armies) that I am working on, I thought I would take a few photos to showcase how far I have got.

A full platoon of Fallschirmjagers (with support weapons and a DFS230 glider) are painted; I've made a good start on some Gebirgsjager to reinforce them and just made a start on some Allied forces to oppose the landings. I have also made a start on some of the terrain, including olive trees which are featured in some of these photos.

The FJ fan out from their crashed DFS230 and meet some resistance from the British who are dug in in an olive grove...

Whilst being outnumbered and outgunned at this early stage of the battle, the Brits put up a valiant fight until reinforcements can be brought forward...

Within minutes, the British bring forward a Mk VI to provide some relief and push the Germans back into cover...

Sensing that this is a critical point in the battle, the Fallschirmjager Leutnant leads his troops forward to bypass the Allied light armour.

 

A small unit of Gebirgsjager, alerted by the sound of gunfire, rush down the hillside towards their comrades...

The Fallschirmjager rush towards the battle and get some of their support weapons set up...

The British aim to hold their thin line...

In this sector, the British are outnumbered and fall back, leaving the Germans to consolidate and expand their defensive perimeter...

Fallschirmjager uniform colour references

I have just about finished painting the last few miniatures for my Fallschirmjager platoon, but thought I would post up some photos of a book that used as source material. The book these pages come from is called German Soldiers of World War Two and features detailed photographs of models wearing actual uniforms, so is great for matching colours to when painting.

Here are the last 5 off the painting table with their highlights done.

I'm not that happy with them for three reasons:

1. I couldn't remember the colours that I used when I painted the rest of the platoon, so they don't quite match the "old" ones
2. My painting skills, which were never that good, seem to have deteriorated
3. My eyesight has certainly deteriorated since I last picked up a paint brush over a year ago, so I'm struggling to see the finer level of detail needed to apply a quality paint job.

Anyway, here are a few shots of the FJs from the original platoon. I am reasonably pleased with these. Comments welcome!

Miniatures always look better when displayed against some wargaming terrain, so here are a couple of shots of my FJ platoon on my Crete table:

Painting the remnants of my Fallschirmjager

Finishing off the FJs

I painted a platoon of FJ from Great Escape Games, which are a mixture of Artizan Designs models and Wargames Foundry, last Christmas (2018), but for some reason left 5 models on the lead mountain. I picked them up a couple of days ago and thought that I would finish them off.

Here are a couple of pics of some of the finished models.

Here are the work-in-progress models with just some of the base colours blocked in so far.

One thing that I have really noticed in the intervening 12 months is that my eyesight and my memory have both deteriorated significantly! For the life of me, I cannot remember the original colours that I used for the completed models; and secondly, I'm really struggling to see the detail when painting.  I borrowed my son's magnifying glass yesterday evening and looked at the 5 guys I am trying to paint. ;-(  It looks like a trip to Specsavers is in order to get some reading glasses.