Nächtjäeger Tale of Four Gamers Month One - Alex

So here's my first month of painting and modelling for the Nächtjäger challenge. Now unlike The rest of them I had to put together a load of motorcycle recce, which certainly brought out my masochistic streak.

I also had got SS motorcycles, now I had planned to just paint them up as Heer troops but when I looked closely at the models and saw the uniforms were completely different I decided to paint them up as SS. Now this is probably historically inaccurate, but in my defence I will put forward the following:

1) I've put together two platoons of motorcycles, I'm not putting more together just to get the right uniforms.

2) At this stage in the war supplies were a little sketchy, so it seems slightly plausible that a group of Heer might get some other uniforms given to them.

3) Riding motorcycles cross country is bound to be grubby work, my motorcyclists will therefore have overalls for when they are riding and will change swiftly into a neat clean uniform when they dismount. 

4) It's my army, naff off.

I'm aware 2&3 do not seem to make sense together.

Anyway, this meant I have had to try doing SS camo, which was fun, if also painstaking and eyesight straining.

Motorcycle recce, out in force

Motorcycle command team

Up close on the rest of them

In addition to the first platoon of motorcycles, I've also done the panzer IV's. All 5 of them (2 HQ and a squad of 3).

For the camo I used the anarchy airbrush stensils which Adam reviewed a while back. Now I don't own an airbrush so I went to Winner's and used his. With his guidance. It turns out that there is a skill to airbrushing, which I don't have, so Winner got quite frustrated and passive aggressive (which if you ever meet Winner is his standard mental state). He did then help me which stopped me drowning the models completely in paint.

Winner doing a better job of airbrushing than me.

Winner getting ready to go 'Darth Maul'

The 3 tone camo, very nice I think.

The stencils were very easy to use and gave a really good 3 tone hard edge camo, the only problem is I went a bit overboard with the amount of paint I used, which somewhat obliterated some of the details on the lovely models. This meant I had to black line to try and get the detail to stand out (I don't normally black line as I find it hard work and a bit too obvious, I usually just do a pinwash).

The black lining helped but they were still lacking something, so I tried chipping with a sponge and some metallic paint. I've not tried this before because I've always thought it looked difficult but in fact it was exceptionally easy and looked really good. I rounded things off by adding liberal amounts of mud. These panzer IV's have been through a lot by this point in the war...

The panzer platoon

HQ

1IC

Anyway, month 1 finished and I've done 675 points worth of stuff, next month I'm not too sure what I'll be doing as a lot of stuff is on order from the quartermasters and I'll see what turns up first. It turns out this whole exercise is feeling a bit like putting together a panzer division in 1945, goodness only knows what will turn up...

The Kampfengrupe so far...