Size comparison !

Here is a comparison of the 4 main manufactures for which I have figures.

From left to right we have Plastic Warlords, Metal Warlords. Perry plastic and Black tree design.

You see that while the other three are quite similar in size and thickness of arms/legs/heads Perry's are more thin (perhaps more anatomically accurate) and seems smaller than the others...

German Late War Infantry

Here are my first two platoons of German for late war. They are two squads with a mix of Assault Rifles and rifles. Each squad has a sergeant and a LMG. I also have an officer with a man for the platoon command. The miniatures are Black tree design and I really like them: very good detail and poses variation: out of 15 or more men just one or two repeated figures...
Till now I used them mostly for volksgrenadiers in support of my Fallschirmjagers and in general they performed very well... I hope in the future to use them in more glorious roles such as sturmpionieers.

The last items (e.g. the officer and most of the rifle armed men) were painted using the speed painting technique used in the warlord website to paint the russians. I really like the overall effect.

First rats from the desert !

These are my first rats !
I am quite happy of the final result but I overall don't like so much the Perry's plastics since they are too small compared to the other minis I have... not yet fully sure if I will complete such project or freeze it !

I am particularly proud of the arty observer that I modified from the standing radio operator !

The only pity i s the poor quality of the photo I did... maybe Santa Claus will bring me a good camera !

Smoke markers

I made an attempt of constructing simple smoke markers for BA. I made two types of smoke: Black for destroyed vehicles and white for smoke screens.

To construct them I used some iron boater (once) used to clean dishes that you may find in some supermarket.

Once I modeled into the desired shape I glued with the hot glue the boater to an iron rove and painted with spry acrylic.

Terrain, terrain ! Part IV: road signals

I continue to build new terrain items and accessories to enrich our wargaming tables.
Now, thanks to our friend Fede Junior, I put my hands on an almost complete Tamiya 1/48 road signals box. I immediately started assembling and painting them and here you see the outcome!

In the background the low walls from Italeri









Two series of terrain: one with normal terrain and the other with road terrain...

Here you see also the street lamps and the palissade.

ready to be put on the tables!

Terrain, terrain! Part III : Russian/Finnish house For Winter War

Waiting the of end Winter War Kickstarter  (pledge here !!) I started building some houses and terrain to be used for russian and finnish terrain.

The design is broadly inspired by the 4ground building that appears in the kickstarter (I loved the pale blue windows idea)
and also in this case is build with forex. On top of that I used 1mm balsa wood for the timber cover...I am not fully happy of that. i should carve more deeply the balsa to have the effect of separate wood boards.

Terrain Terrain ! Part II: a 3-storey building !

More and More difficult ! After reading the inspiring post from Bob Emmerson on wwpd bolt action forum I started a new project to build some north-European town buildings. I started with this three storey building and I am quite happy about the final result... The process can be quite easily standardized an some other similar building can be built using the same system.

The building is enriched by some additional items like the street name plate, the building number and a couple of WWII posters i found on the internet and printed. Rue du Poulet is in honor of our friend Pollo (=chicken=poulet) who heroically keeps using german !

Terrain, Terrain ! Part I: an European 2 storey building

Bolt action (which we enjoy a lot) forced me to work hard creating terrain suitable for 28mm figures. I re-adapted my basement and created a large workbench. Then I started (re)-collecting cardboard, polystyrene, mdf, flock, balsa wood etc.

One of the first project I completed has been building a 2 storey European building.  To construct it I use 5mm forex that is easily cuttable. I draw the pieces on the board and then glued some floor textures I created with word. I am pretty happy of the final result although I did not attached windows and doors to increase usability with BA.

Command Post

Here is my scratch built command post in 28mm. I took inspiration from the Baueda command post and built it by using DAS putty for the sandbags and balsa wood for the wooden parts.

The whole command post is internally large enough to accommodate 4-5 figures or a single large 50-60mm base for an MMG or a light AT gun.


In the following you find some details on the construction of the command post, and some comments on things i would not redo in the same way... I hope you like it  (as my germans do) !

Lizardmen for sale

for sale on ebay my lizardmen army made up of 24 saurus warriors, 30 skinks, 6 saurus on cold ones, 6 Kroxigors, 6 chamaleon skinks, 2 terradons, 1 salamander, various heroes... painted to very good standard and some to showcase standard. Update jan 17: I was able to sell all the pack to a lucky triplet of buyers from France Spain and Italy. I hope they will use them since I painted and never played with them. 

Objectives: something worth fighting for !

I had really good time designing three objectives for our new table! They are built from the 1/48 Tamiya jerry cans set. two of them are made up of german equipment and one of US.


I based them on 40mm round mdf bases I got from minibits (an erroneous order so I found a way to use these otherwise too small bases.) Hope you like them and will be inspiring... I plan to do more of them in the future with spare parts and unused soldiers.

New bases from minibits

Inspired by the article on Blotaction.net I decided to rebase my teams. I found that single figures for teams are not so nice since I tend to mix them with other platoons. I then decided the following basing:

2 men teams on 50mm round bases

3 men teams on 60mm round bases

In addition I wanted to have some removable bases on the team ones so as to remove casualties. Hence, I contacted my favourite (and sole) bases provider (minibits) if he could provide me pre-cut bases: They did ! Here is a picture of the 60mm base with 2*25mm holes suited for mortar and MMG teams.

Here is the base with the holes bottom mad with magnetic material. note the small magnet placed in the wood part of the base so one can attach additional pieces on top of it (the piece is on around base under which I sticked some other magnetic sheet. I took the round magnet from a Geomac piece (an old toy of my kids they no longer use)

My BA US army (almost) complete !

Hi guys,

I have (almost) finished my US army and very proud to show it in all its splendor !

It consists of two ranger squads and two normal infantry squads supported by a bunch of MMGs, mortars, bazooka, flamers and snipers !

I am also very happy about the final basing i obtained by using mdf pre cut bases. I will better illustrate that in a later post...
comments welcome !

Awesome bunch of lead !

I am amazed by Black Tree Design customer service ! I dropped an order of 28mm german and us to reinforce my BA squads on SUNDAY (they had their fantastic 50% off sale ending that day)....
I received the items TODAY (on thursday) in ITALY form UK !

really amazing !

here's a picture of the lead i got and a detail of the US 57mm AT gun
all this stuff come at about 50 EU including postage !!!