Painting Challenge Curt Geld

Every year for the Challenge, Curt asks each participant to ship him a 28mm figure as an entry fee.  For every figure (since dubbed the Curtgeld), Curt makes a donation to our local animal shelter.  For each Challenge the Curtgeld needs to fit a particular theme.  This year he gave us a curve ball and asked for team efforts.

My Curtgeld project is a team effort with Sylvain.  I've finished my piece of the project and will be handing it over to Sylvain shortly.  The base is unfinished as Sylvain's  wizardry includes terraforming the base.

We wanted to go with something that Curt could use on table and decided that a weapon team that would fit his SCW project might do the trick.  This is a Perry model of an Italian  20mm Breda Auto-cannon from the brothers' WW2 range.  The Chain of Command lists allows such a team as support for both the SCW and WW2, so it seemed to fit the bill.  Although it was officially an AA gun, it has a decent ant-tank and anti-personal effect under CoC, especially for the SCW.  I will note that CoC specifes a team of 5 and the Perry pack comes with a team of 3, but Curt can work that out - he doesn't strictly go by the lists anyway.

I will be happy going back to the SYW!

This set was a brand new release during the Challenge, but I liked the look of and was looking forward to a modelling challenge.  Well I can safely say that I now know my modelling skill limits and this gun is definitely past them!  Adventures encountered on the way included the following mandatory steps.

• Not being sure how things fit together and finding the Ikea like drawing that almost helped
• Gluing bits to my fingers and my fingers to each other and everything else
• Almost gluing bits in backwards
• Losing a key piece and having to replicate it (a round base is now replaced by a washer and a piece of card)
• Assembling the gun and carriage without the gunner for painting, only to find out that I couldn't fit the painted gunner under the painted gun.  I had to disassemble the gun to get things together.
• Having bits that I was sure were firmly glued on drop off unexpectedly.  Of course as soon as I took the photos, I picked it up by the gunner and the rest of the gun and team fell off. 

The end result is rougher than I would have liked and a definite bodge together in spots, but hopefully people apply the two foot rule and see it mostly in action on table.

Note the many, many tiny parts!  Also the gunner comes cast onto the seat so it's not as illustrated!

Painting wise, I found several museum examples of the weapon in a medium green with black gun barrel etc.  Action photos tend to be from North or East Africa and show a sand coloured carriage and barrel.  I went with the green and black to avoid an all over tan effect.

Action photo with what looks like the green/black gun and a mostly naked but much wimpier crew.  Terrain could be North or East Africa

The Perry crew are in tropical kit and are very stripped down.  Sylvain's comment was that they are also very beefy!  The Italians in the SCW went into the theatre in Tropical kit but most pictures that I've seen include long pants, and they changed to warmer wear over the winter.  I guess that this crew has been working their gun hard and it's been hard work.  I went with generic tan clothes with brown leather belts etc.  The pecs and abs gave challenges but layers of various fleshtones with washes seems to get the effect OK.

I quite like the Officer with binoculars