"...And who will tell my Legions, who loved Caesar, that it was not murder?"

OK... here is the deal... I need legionaries, 64 of them (actually I need 128, but I can borrow some). So today I have six sprues of Warlord Games plastic Roman legionaries in front of me. I am goning to take them out to the parking lot and prime them. Then the painting will begin. I have the better part of three days to finish this. Let's see if I can make a go of it.

"Remember what the general said; we're the cavalry. It would be bad form to arrive in advance of schedule."

My British Airborne group (special order) finally arrived:

I cleaned and based the two company command teams, the observer and the staff teams. By my estimation I have everyone standed or on painting sticks I need for my Airlanding Company. The exception being I haven't bought the Tetrarchs, nor have I bought all of the necessary jeeps I need.

My progress so far:

• Company Command, cleaned, based & primed
• All my Airlanding platoons (4) are all primed and have the flesh painted.
• All (8) 6 pdr AT guns are assempled; primed & base coated in Russian Uniform.
• AT crew, cleaned & primed
• 75mm pack howitzers (4) are drilled out, assembled, primed and base coated in Russian Uniform.
• RA artillery crew, cleaned and primed (observer & staff teams cleaned, primed and based)
• Sniper teams (3), Light Mortar teams (4), PIAT teams (6) & Pathfinder team (1) are primed, basecoated, based and bases textured.
• Mortar section cleaned and glued to painting sticks (Observers based and bases textured)
• MG Section cleaned, based and bases textured.
• Two (three)Objectives have been built and mounted on a textured base.

Not sure how I ended up with three objectives. I guess I will use one to test out my base colors

Tim, they call him...

There are no atheists in a foxhole...

The last game I played of Flames of War involved attacking prepared positions, with the defenders starting dug in. Normally when you move out of foxholes, the dug in marker is removed and the foxholes vanish (much like my tax return). The one exception to this is when you counterattack out of foxholes. You may retreat back into them. While it doesn't specifically say so, the folks I play with decided that means you return back to your position prior to the assault. That means there should be some way to mark the holes position.

At first I came up with some markers that I cleverly labeled "Foxholes". I thought the marker lacked something. So I thought about doing a 3D version. I had tried in the past to make markers out of liquitex resin sand, but they took a long time and were costly (the resin sand isn't cheap!).

Next I tried some felt markers... they weren't a whole lot better then my paper foxhole markers.

Then I tried some rubber railroad road bed. It was easy to cut, but only came in black (grey-black). I found you could paint, glue sand or flock them and they looked ok. This was more work than I wanted to do, however.

The final iteration was to use brown cork model railroad road bed. It has the apperance of upturned earth & sand from the beginning. All I have to do is cut them out and bevel the side edges. I knocked about 20 medium base sized foxholes in a couple of hours. No painting, just cut to size, bevel the edges and you are ready to go. The look great too!



I am gonna make some more tonight!

Tim, they call him...