Saturday, June 23, 2012

Tigers 1E: Let's do it again...

One of good points about writing a blog is that you can easily look retrospectively in the past to observe how things changed in time.

For instance, I like to look at my previously painted models to compare how I used to paint them and how I would do it today. The bad thing is that I usually instantly want to repaint all of them. One of break-through points that made me thing about re-painting models was the addition of an airbrush. It completely changed the way I paint German armor. 

I decided to re-paint one by one ale the models I really liked. I will  try to report you about the progress, so you can assess whether some progress in painting technique was made ;)

I started with the first model I have ever painted - the mighty Tiger 1E. When I was painting it in February 2011 I tried to use all the techniques I could find in web (e.g., pin wash, pigments). I was quite happy with the results then, but I quickly realized how many mistakes I made while painting ;)

This time I tried to make it better :) First I had to strip the paint from the model. It was really painful job - next time I think I'm going to seriously consider buying a new one ;)

The photo you see below has now some historical value ;) It is the Tiger as it looked before and after finishing re-painting.

The Tiger before re-painting (painted in February 2011)

The Tiger after stripping the paint

The same Tiger after re-painting (painted in June 2012)

The same Tiger in action
Which one you like more? ;)



Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Master in Warehouse, Poznan 2012

During last weekend I had enormous pleasure to take part in the Master tournament in Poznan.

The event was quite notable. There were 21 players competing on 11 tables full of masterpiece terrain features.

 I decided to take my new SS-Panzerpioniers and have fun as much as I could. I hadn't been playing for such a long time so I was really hungry for game experience. And indeed I had great opponents that made these two days pure pleasure, and made me even more hungry for the next games in the following days. 

What about the results? As I expected from beginning my order of battle was not a "tournament-ready" one. Together with many simple mistakes that I made, it made me finish at 15th place. My colleague Kondziu was 16th with his ultra-fun Finnish panzer company (btw. some of the photos from the tournament below were made by Kondziu).

OK so what I've learned about my company. First of all, as I suspected it is extremely vulnerable to panzer companies with large number of tanks (two battles with Soviets and one with British amor proved it well); you don't want to leave your Tigers in reserves against panzerspah with Tigers, Brummbars and Pumas; and panzer pioniers are killers for infantry :)

Couple of photos...