Thursday 30 August 2012

Pan European Reinforcements



Well for some this next statement will come as no surprise. I actually stripped off all the paint  on both my Pan Euro 7 DBLE and Yellow Peril Combine miniatures. Why I hear you ask (metaphorically that is as I can't actually hear you over the internet)? Well, for three reasons.

First, my understanding of modern camo design and application is much greater than when I first painted the original schemes for both of these units. I now know that current military practice is to use a camo scheme whose design is applied consistently on each unit; so while a GEV might have a different arrangement to a tank, all the GEVs would have the same scheme, and all the tanks would have their own scheme, on each applied identically.

When I originally painted up these units I was working from knowledge based on WW2 practice, where the Germans in particular, while specifying the colours, left the application to the crews and their commanders. Camoflage has moved on a long way since WW2, and I wanted my forces to reflect modern practice, as I'm not going for a BattleTech retro-future look.

The second reason was that the Yellow Peril scheme looked tired to me, hence my updating the look on the OGREs as I showed with a work-in-progress picture a few posts back. The third reason is that since I will be demostrating OGRE at DragonMeet for the SJG as a  MiB, I kind of thought that my Combine unit should use official Combine miniatures?

My plan is to re-task the old Yellow Peril miniatures to represent a Nihon Empire unit, or some other force, which has no official miniatures, though I understand that Nihon OGREs are planned as a future release from SJG.
 
And this is why there have been no updates on my OGREs, as this lot has been on my workbench for the last few days, and it just takes time to paint the camo scheme, and in this case add magnets to all the turreted, or articulated vehicles I was working on.
  

6 comments:

  1. I'd really like to see (or paint) minis with a modern digital camo scheme - something derived from MARPAT or CADPAT, or for real weirdness the second one here: http://www.hyperstealth.com/CUEPAT/index.html . Not at all sure how well the pixelation would show up on minis, though.

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    1. Good link. IMNSHO :-) digital as it is applied now will go the way of the dinosaurs in due course, due to computer image processing that will be able to detect pixelation. However, saying that breaking up shapes is a good thing and pixelation may have a part to play in that in a modified form. YMMV on that of course? The second example is not as good as the Berlin Brigade urban camo that BAOR used.

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    2. As at http://www.hsgalleries.com/gallery04/images/centurionexpo2005_4.jpg ? That might even lie within my painting skills!

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  2. Mmmm, Ogre. I haven't played in decades. (is that sad to admit?)

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    1. Only sad because you haven't been having the fun that comes from driving a huge cybertank around a battlefield and nuking everything in sight.

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