Greek For A Change!

My recent organising efforts have had some effect, to the extent that I’ve now finished some figures for those conflicts/armies that I’d determined had been neglected over recent years. Some effort has also been expended in getting figures for these neglected armies ready for painting.

Some of the most neglected forces were my 20mm Balkan Wars armies so I thought I’d try and make some progress with them. My original plan was to add a couple of Serbian infantry battalions along with an HQ and a machine gun detachment, but that plan has (needless to say) been modified! I’ve recently bought one of the new Osprey Men-At-Arms books on armies in South Russia in 1919 and reading that made me think I could maybe kill two birds with one stone. Without going into the complicated story of the Entente/Allied powers in WW1 becoming embroiled in Russia (I find it quite difficult to keep track of) I decided to try and model some Greek troops, since I could use them for the earlier Balkan Wars as well as for operations in South Russia.

Now you can get hold of WW2 Greek troops in 20mm scale (or figures that will pass for them), but not Balkan Wars figures. In the end I opted for a compromise solution. Early War Miniatures make WW2 Greek Evzones, elite light infantry formations that wear a distinctive uniform (see here for more info). Although these figures are wearing Greek pattern steel helmets, EWM make a range of separate heads for figures and, although they don’t make heads with Evzone soft caps, they do make heads for WW2 Italian Blackshirts and in this scale those are close enough for me!

This meant I had to cut off the heads with the steel helmets, file a small flat on the coat collars, drill out the bodies and then superglue the new heads to my fingers the bodies (see picture below). Tricky, but manageable since I only needed to change a dozen figures.

After changing the heads it was just a case of basing and priming them – I’ve run out of 1p coins to use as bases so these figures got some slightly thicker MDF bases that I’d got and intended to use as game markers. Although the MDF bases work out more expensive than 1p a base I quite like them to work with and they seem more durable as far as resisting knocks and bumps on the edges go.

I decided to paint up one test figure before moving on to the rest. Most of the books I’ve got refer to the Greek uniform colour of the period as an olive khaki so I used Vallejo WW2 Russian Uniform as the closest I could find (see picture below showing the figure compared to . . . an olive! In real life the colours appear closer than in this photo)!

Although a lot of artwork shows the Evzones caps pulled forward on the head, some photographs show them pushed back, so the Blackshirt heads look about right. The picture below shows the Evzone, along with an Ottoman Turkish infantryman painted as a test figure at the same time (a plastic Hat figure) – the faces look a bit uneven in the large scale photo but look OK fine on the figure!

Since I’ve got a bit behind in preparing figures (and caught up with some of the neglected ones) I now need to prepare the rest of the Evzones and Ottoman infantry, so it might be a while before I post any more painted figures. I am at least trying to stick to finishing off those armies that don’t need much work or which have been neglected of late!

While I’ve been doing these my wife has asked for my advice on drybrushing! She’s recently come back to doing decoupage crafting, concentrating on applying napkin images over wooden craft shapes to brighten up the house (she does this for her self and keeps the items she makes). She’s painted the edges of the wood shapes and then mentioned that people drybrush around the edges onto the images to soften their appearance, so she asked me about how to do this. She’s got some small craft sponges on sticks so I said have a go with them rather than brushes. The two items below are her first attempts at this, drysponging (if that’s even a word) pale purple and blue around the edges and I think she’s done a pretty good job!

All I can say is that I’m not going to be a happy bunny if I come in from work one day to find some of my tank models drybrushed in purple or blue!