Well technically there was some progress the Panzer 38T got about 6 millimetres high before the bloody printer went and died on me.
It is, to coin a German phrase, Kerfucktenbuggered! What makes it worse is that I had just found a source of short barrelled Early Stug III not to mention armoured cars, M3’s trucks and the like… to put it mildly I am a bit miffed.
Thankfully I have got enough stuff to run a game, but not enough to have a second set to give away.
To compound my misery further my voice keeps cracking I now sound like a child whose voice is cracking and then my Wife’s car broke down in Lerwick so I had to go and pick her up, popped into the shop to get some things and good old Dale the assistant had to chat, so Captain Helium had to explain what he had been up to today.
On the up side, the garage phoned me up today to say the part they evidently ordered errr before I went to Orkney (round about the start of August) has now turned up! It is booked in next Tuesday.
I now have to decide whether to investigate to see what went kaput on the printer or get it sent back to Amazon as luckily it is less than a year old.
So tonight I did a smidge more painting, I painted 4 Lizardmen.
Basically the four grey ones. Whilst feeling quite pleased with myself, I suddenly remembered that I had all of the mesoamerican terrain to paint too. I don’t know why I hadn’t remembered the statues as I have to move them every time I open the paint box lid.
It was a nice drive over to work from a meeting in Lerwick today.
Tomorrow I intend to make a start on the tanks. It was my intention to print some more off this evening, but sadly my good lady forgot to bring our laptop home with her so I couldn’t get any sliced.
Well that is the holiday over, apart from an 8 hour journey home.
Orkney has been great, but I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned I was there, it rained and the tents flooded. We had to spend £55 to get in the hostel for an evening.
Anyway some photos…
Precursor to the Churchill barrier, one if the actual barrier to the left of the photo.
Tomb of the Eagles
Ness of Brodgar, top photo shows the 4 metre wide wall, middle one shows an unusual and very large rectangular Neolithic building. The bottom shows the extent of the excavations to date, but basically based on geophysics, every bit of the grass that can be seen has a structure under it. Not bad for buildings 5000 years old.
They were importing goods from as far away as Cumbria (and beyond, I just can’t remember where else 🙄)
These are the stones of Stenness – these predate Stonehenge. A tenant farmer tried to blow these up with dynamite but was stopped by the local population! The two concrete blocks mark where another couple of stones stood. In 1906 one if the stones below that had fallen was replaced by 8 men and a wooden scaffold. For scale these are about 15 feet (5 metres high)
The ring of Brodgar, a famous Orkney land mark. These stones differ from the ones above in that they are not dug in as deep. They come from 19 different parts of Orkney and current thinking is that they are so shallow (around 30cm) as they were meant to be taken down and replaced by other stones. The ditch was cut into bed rock with Neolithic tools of antler picks!
Well the weather here has been awesome up to this evening, it has clouded over as the day drew on. Yesterday we had some Neolithic and Viking/Norse shenanigans. Today we had more pre history with a visit to the Tomb of the Eagles followed by some more Viking/Norse remains, not to forget a run along the Churchill barriers.
No pictures as my phone camera is totally shot and their is no internet at the campsite to upload pics either.
Hobby wise I have been doing so more reading on the Sudan campaign to save Gordon. Eventually I will run the campaign to do so from Suakin on the Red Sea.
We will be using my 10mm Pendraken forces and terrain to fight. The idea is that players will be officers of her majesty playing against an Umpire or two. I like the Science versus pluck rules so will use them.
The general commanding will have to organise supplies and request troops etc prior to the campaign. They will aim to reach Berber where the campaign will end.
Anyone who wants a non combat role can be a reporter for the Times.
Sometimes the fact that my parents hung onto things for decades does have its advantages. Both have passed away now but these were kept by my father and now belong to me…
These are just some of the treasures I now have.
I have a number of other such booklets from WW2 not to mention a WW1 bayonet that was given to my father in round about 1926 to play with! It does go nicely with my WW1 Lee Enfield 😁. I was going to do First World War cavalry as a great uncle had been in the Northumberland Hussars, but my move to Shetland put pay to that. The rifle was purchased and deactivated before it became difficult to get such things.
Got the elves sprayed white and decided to give the new ones a Contrast paint job too.
I am really warming to these paints especially for the 10mm minis. This is the Plaguebearer Flesh over a white undercoat, I really like the way it is a very yellow green. I gave the faces a quick blast with the Guilliman Flesh. It really does bring out the detail. The red colour is the Blood Angels Red.
I will crack on with these tomorrow and hope to have everything completely finished by the end of the weekend.
Today I promised to take the kids to the loch. It is really shallow, especially when the tide is out.
Not a bad place to have on the doorstep.
It was a little misty to begin with today, but still very warm. When the sun came out it made really pleasing patterns on the water…
And on a totally different note, we had a massive visitor to Shetland today…
For those that watch ‘Shetland’ (never seen it myself) but Jimmy Perez’s house is second from the left.
Sadly I cannot remember who took this photo, it definitely isn’t mine.
Well, I managed to get some painting done over the last couple of days…
I decided to have a bash at the 10mm elves. As I had some contrast paint knocking about I decided to give it a go on a smaller scale.
Now if you remember, the last lot of these that I painted really ground me down (https://bogenwaldblog.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/back-to-the-elves/ ). Now I don’t know if it was the different paint, my state of mind or a combination of both, but basically I enjoyed painting these. The contrast paint really worked on them. As I only had three pots of it I painted with washes as well just to keep the momentum up. They have come along a bit since this photo was taken this evening. All that is left now is the metalwork, washes on the hair and then the bases painting.
I decided to get some new contrast paint ( the eagle eyed mathematicians amongst you would have realised that I had more than three pots in the photo above)..this was used on the 10mm stuff as well as the 28mm MI. Now to be fair I am still getting to grips with this paint, but, it does definitely seem to be helping speed things up a bit. Some of it seems to work better than others, but it could be that I haven’t shaken it up enough, or that perhaps a grey undercoat (in the case of the MI) isn’t the best.🤔
We have had a house guest since last Friday, today was his last day and he really, really wanted to see some Puffins… he had been to Sumburgh the day he arrived, but they were all out at sea. Today was a nice sunny day… 22.5 degrees which was a bit warm for us hardy northerners 😂. We took him down to see if the blasted birds had come back, luckily a good dozen or so made an appearance.
I forgot the camera so had to make do with my IPad. Here we have a phot of a pair, the one on the right is flaring into land. Then something amazing happened…
A chick (puffing) appeared, this is a lot more rare than one might expect. Bonxies (Shetland name for the Great Skua) would have him in a flash so they normally appear at night to have a bit of a wing flap (you can just see him at the entrance to his burrow).
As for the radar… Fitful head had a radar station set up during WW2. This helped foil a Luftwaffe raid on Scapa flow in Orkney. They picked up the raid and gave the AA gunners in Orkney a heads up as to direction and speed.
Being a bit exposed on the Southern point of Shetland, sometimes grumpy German gunners would vent their spleen as they flew past…. you can see the effect here…
So that is a little bit more on the out and about on Shetland Blog 🤣.
I managed a bit of painting tonight (shock, horror). This was after going to a concert a couple of my kids were in (more on that later).
The bulk of these are standard infantry. They were painted in the Leviadon blue Contrast paint. It is sort of working over the grey primer. They will have the dark grey armour and helmet like the previous ones. The one in green is a Pathfinder sniper. His uniform is camouflaged and his armour etc is a dark green. Their faces are white as I am going down the paint with a wash for the skin tones. Still a very long way to go but at least I am painting again.
As for the concert. It was the end of a week long (we have broken up for the summer) creative project including dance and painting etc. It was all to do with the red necked phalarope.
Which looks like this:
We have a small breeding population on the island of Fetlar (which I knew) and they migrated South (which again I knew) however what I did not know until this project is that they don’t head south to the Med or Africa in fact they head pretty much West then South then west some more until they reach the Pacific Ocean off Peru.
Bogenwald 