Van Diemen's World Devils: Infantry Squad TO-DONE!

Hi folks,

To commemorate ANZAC day, I have been working hard to get my Van Diemen's World Devils projects finished. The figures are cobbled together from a couple of Victoria Miniatures kits, apart from the Citadel Commissar who just has a fancy slouch hat. Painting them, I couldn't help feeling spoilt by the quality of Citadel miniatures. Victoria Miniatures are a great little company and they offer some amazingly characterful kits, but the figures were damn hard to paint!

The bodies and lasguns are all from the Victoria Miniatures Arcadian Female troops range, which have had their helmets removed and replaced by slouch hats form the Van Diemen's World Devils range. You can read about my terrible woes putting them together in an older post.

If assembling this squad was tricky, painting them was abominable. I think next time I do Astra Militarum I will have to take a bit more time. My plan with these figures was to speed paint them and then add some neat details. What I ended up doing was hours of touch-ups for very little pay off! Few of the edges on these figures were sharp, which made hard-lining/drybrushing less effective, and things like creases in the clothing were not well enough defined to take a quick wash and look good. Finally, whatever skills I had in painting eyeballs were not enough for this job. I can see some eyeball painting practice in my near future :-)

Here are few close-ups

Looking back on it, this little project was far more challenging than some of the others I have finished over the past couple of years. I definitely considered giving up on them a few times, but the fact that they were for a good mate stopped me. Australians like to think that this spirit of giving your all, so that you don't let your mates down, is unique to them. I'm not sure about that, but it has led us to do some courageous things under terrible conditions. On ANZAC day, that is something that we celebrate, as we remember those who gave so much more than a few nights of utter frustration painting eyeballs.

Lest we forget,

M4cr0