This is astounding. I’ve finally completed my platoon of German Panzergrenadiers for TooFatLardies Chain of Command skirmish rules set. My opponent is hard at work on a platoon of US infantry, so now I have to get cracking on approximately eleventy-billion feet of bocage.
The gang assembled for review…
That’s the basic platoon on the left. Zugs 1-3 in column, with the platoon leader, and a platoon asset Panzerschreck team up front. At the back right are a medic, tripod mounted MG-42 team, a sniper team, a forward observer, and a Panzerknacker team. Up front on the right is a PAK-40 painted in a color that doesn’t even come CLOSE to dunkelgelb. Accompanying the ATG are a couple of very poorly painted Stugs.
The Stugs and ATG (and the one-story building in the back) are some of the very first things I painted when I started out on this whole miniatures wargaming thing. They’ll be repainted/replaced eventually, but they’ll serve for now!
ArkieGamer 
Comments
A very tidy-looking outfit you have there Leutnant Von Arkie!
Thanks. Hopefully I can do credit to my Prussian forbears!
And if you get a chance, could you show me where the iron crosses grow? ;)
Only Steiner can do that.
Way, way ahead of me. :-)
Don’t worry, I keep giving myself more things to do, so I’ll never get THAT far ahead.
Amazing blog. Could you walk me through your basing techniques for WW2 infantry?
Hi James, and thanks!
I base my 20mm figures on US pennies, which are 3/4″ in diameter, and maybe 3/32″ in thickness. You can’t buy a basing material that’s cheaper, here!
The ‘ground’ is Vallejo pumice gel, tinted with burnt umber paint. The gel is sort of an adhesive, and I dip it in a plastic bowl full of a mix of model railroad ballast material in a couple of different sizes. Leave to dry overnight.
After the pumice gel has dried, I paint over the ballast with watered down white glue so that the ballace/pumice gel concoction is toughened up for the long haul. I usually leave this to dry overnight, as well.
Then there’s a simple two-stage drybrushing of the bases, using burn sienna to start, and finishing up with yellow ochre. This dries very quickly, and I move on to adding static grass.
The static grass is also kept in a plastic bowl, and after adding some strategic dobs of watered down white glue, I dip the figure base into the bowl of static grass, and get it good and covered. I sort of push the static grass down so that I know it’s getting good contact with the glue, and gently shake off the worst of the excess. Let this sit for quite a few hours. I usually do this overnight, actually.
Finally, I get a big soft brush and clean all the excess static grass off…if you brush upwards, it helps give the grass some consistent shape, as well. When everything’s nicely cleaned up, I spray the figures with Testors Dullcote, which you may or may not be able to get, depending on where you are in the world.
Honestly, at this scale, I wish I’d started out using that small ground foam stuff, instead of the static grass, but I was locked in to matching some earlier figures. It seems like too much of a sharp transition from the ‘earth’ to the grass on my bases. Maybe the ground foam with a few tufts of static grass would look a little better?
Thanks for your interest, and I hope this helps!
Basing my men is something I feel I haven’t perfected yet. You can see an example here: http://inexperiencedmodelmaker.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/pak-40-from-italeri.html . I use wall crack filler, paint brown, then completely cover in flock. But I really want to have more of the earth showing. And to accomplish that, I want a base that looks less sculpted, as mine tend to. I will look into your method. Thanks for the help.