Whoa Mahomet!
As Guy indicated in his introduction, I’m a slow-poke painter. Mostly because I tend to get meticulous and (believe I) have high standards for my miniatures. It probably has something to do with the fact that I came to miniature wargaming after nearly two decades of building 1/35 scale models and, after that, painting 54mm figures. You build those for the sole purpose of displaying them and they reward careful work. I’m also a slow painter - in regards to finishing projects - because I tend to get distracted by the next pretty miniature that comes along (hence the name of my now mostly deceased blog: ferret’s attention span…) But I think I’ll be able to finish British para’s, Denison smock and all, within the planned time-span.
When the Airborne Museum (Oosterbeek, NL) was remodelling in the early 90s, I got involved. They had a 1/35 scale diorama of three Horsa gliders being unloaded in the northwestern corner of LZ S, near where the Germans were building what is now the A12 freeway from Arnhem to Utrecht. The Horsa models were very nice, but the accompanying figures were a bit dated looking and some had ‘disappeared’ through the years (the diorama was not always in a plastic case!). Over a period of two years or so, I cobbled together about twenty soldiers of the 2nd battalion of the South Staffordshire regiment and a few of the 21st Independent Parachute Company greeting the new arrivals. The museum was very supportive and - as seen to the right - even loaned me a surviving Denison smock as a painting reference. The point of all this waffling is: I’ve looked at this particular camo pattern so often and painted it enough to be confident that I can do a good and fairly quick job on the miniatures. I’ll be mostly using Bolt Action Paras (even though they all seem to be missing the flap dangling down on the photo there), some Foundry ones and perhaps some others as well. I’m certainly going to get more samples and see what they’re like.
That diorama, by the way, did not survive the most recent remodelling of the Airborne museum. It clearly did not fit the new ‘design concept’. 😉
