Be careful what you wish for Nigel, and the weather has most defo been Abby Normal around here lately Simon.
Our long national nightmare is finally over. What has basically amounted to a completely wasted summer, yet again, is now in the rear-view mirror and I can move on to other projects. My apologies for this dragging on as long as it did, but sometimes there isn't anything you can do but silently scream. Ok, maybe not always silently...
Not much to report on the final touches that were needed to get everything done. The only thing of note was the decision to hand paint the signage on the café window. While the printed version looked fine, I realised it would look a bit odd with the printing behind the glass. Hand painting also gives it a more realistic look and feel. The smaller lettering was going to be too much of a hassle to try and do so I just left it off. The trick to painting on clear plastic or glass is to give the surface a coat of matt varnish to help the paint stick. If you want shinier glass, then a coat of gloss afterwards will work fine.
Galleries can be found
here and
here
And a couple of teasers, click on photos for full size.
I didn't add a gallery for our grenade lobbing chap as I'm not terribly happy with how he turned out. If you compare him with any of the other figures, you would be forgiven in thinking he was painted by someone else. I'll get into the paints below, for now, here's the finished piece
Getting back to the figure set, we have some good and some not quite as good things going on. First off, the subject is the main draw as Polish figures are thin on the ground in any scale. Overall quality is good with some room for improvement in fine and missing details. You basically get a very good starting point which can then be improved to taste and/or skill level. The options supplied with helmets/caps and rifles is a plus, although the standard long rifles all have bayonets attached and lack bolts. The bolts are an easy fix, removing the bayonets isn't. The shorter rifles have the correct curved bolts, but these were used by cavalry units. I suppose you could replace the long rifles with WW1 German rifles as they appear to be the same, or close enough.
The equipment is generally correct, a bit of variety would have been nice with the bread bags and gas mask carriers. Again, fairly easy to modify should you wish. The backpacks and blanket rolls are well done, the buckles on the straps are the only things that you may want to replace as they aren't really well defined. It would have been nice for an option without the blankets, once again, a relatively easy fix should you go that route.
Fit is generally good, but you may want to remove the keys on the equipment to make placement easier. Dry fitting is important even though all the main parts are keyed to fit one way. Mold draft can hinder fit so keep an eye out for that to save you unnecessary putty work. I didn't end up using the decals. The rank flashes for the epaulets don't always seem to be present, at least with lower ranks. The helmets don't need badges, and I made a metal cap badge for one of the two figures. That would have been a nice option, caps with metal badges.
The usual pros/cons for all injected molded figures apply here too. Sometimes things just don't work out well no matter how much thought and proper engineering goes into a figure because of the nature of the molding process. You might be saying, "well Tamiya..." Tamiya is Tamiya. They have resources available that smaller outfits either don't, or can't justify spending on or passing those costs on to their customers. I don't know the particulars here, but I can guess that cost is a major factor into what gets done, and how it gets done. Saying that, this is more than a decent effort and a promising one. Hopefully we get to see more in the future.
Turning our attention to the paints, since they are now a part of IBG, I'm a little less enthused. If your idea of a painted figure is to apply base coats and then a wash to act as shading, these are fine. You will need to apply a couple of coats for good coverage, but they do work well enough for that and can probably be airbrushed well. However, the pigment content is far too low for achieving really good results on small scale figures. The paint just will not behave properly when compared to a Vallejo or AK 3rd Gen. You will spend far too much time trying to get a decent result than is worth the candle. The paint sets themselves are ok in terms of colour choices, and the pigment types are pretty good in terms of quality. The paint flows and settles nicely and dries flat, which is all positive, but all that is undone by the pigment content (or lack thereof). Seeing as you need to mix all your colours and shades, you don't really need an extra level of work thrown in to the, erm, mix. To top it off, the paints are extremely thin, meaning that a wet palette isn't going to be of much use. I do hope the formula can be improved as there is enough to kinda sorta like and it would be nice to see what they could become. Oh, and I did find the universal thinner to be rather promising and will comment more on that as it gets used, so keep an eye out for future projects.
I think that about covers it, I do want to thank everyone who followed along and commented. And a very big thanks to IBG for letting me have some fun, even if it took forever.
Kimmo
PS I'll be doing a bunch of stuff over at my other home away from home for the next few months, and out of courtesy won't be posting the builds here but will add galleries.
