Perry Miniatures British 8th Army Platoon!

Well, at long last, I've finished my Perry Miniatures 8th Army platoon. I mean, there's still more work I could do on these guys but TBH I'm heartily sick of painting them, so I'm gonna call them done. Hopefully the remainder of this post will help explain what I mean.

Here's the platoon command section. I built it with the 2-in. mortar instead of the Boys AT rifle, because I'd already painted a Boys and crew at the same time as I did the 6-pounder guns. The Perry command guys are nice, there's a radioman as well as a platoon commander in a natty sweater. I have two command types here because my Perry box came with TWO command sprues instead of one, netting me two extra models. This was a good thing since one of the other Perry models met a sticky end in an encounter with my Dyson vacuum cleaner... ouch.

Each section was built with a section commander with Thompson SMG, seven riflemen, and a Bren gunner and number two.

I also added two Vickers machineguns. These are metal models from the Perrys and are quite nice.

Here's another section. There's a decent mix of poses in the Perry box but to me, one is just mystifying... that's the lad sat down on both knees at the extreme right of the picture, above. Who sits like that, other than maybe a tripod machinegunner?? There are several of these poses in the box of course and it's the only one I really don't like... at least there's no prone riflemen though, right Greg? :-)

The last section has everyone up and running, including the Bren gunner.

Some shots showing the backs of the models. This is my beef with the Perry 8th Army plastics: for some reason the web equipment (straps mainly) are very poorly defined on the models. This is in stark contrast to the excellent definition on their Afrika Korps models. The DAK dudes were super-easy to paint while these 8th Army lads... were not. There was quite a bit of guesswork involved in determining exactly where the straps were and this added a bunch of time and faffing about to the painting process. 

The metal Perry models had much better defined web equipment, fortunately.

See what I mean with the plastics? I guess if I'd taken more time and care these may have ended up looking better, but by the end of painting them I just wanted them done. They're likely good enough for my tabletop. In any case, for posterity, the formula was: Uniforms and helmets: AK Light Earth, Agrax wash, highlight Light Earth. Socks: Steel Legion Drab. Web equipment: XV-88, Agrax wash, highlight Zandri Dust, Agrax wash. Rifles and wood: Mournfang Brown, highlight Skrag Brown. Mortars etc.: Zandri Dust mostly. Bases: Steel Legion, Zandri, Rakarth Flesh.

So here's the 8th Army force so far. The Grant tank has been basecoated (trying to figure out whether I should put it in camo paint) and I discovered a Matilda that I bought but haven't yet started. There's still a couple of Universal Carriers kicking around for these lads as well. Anyway this lot should be enough for a game as-is.

Thanks for reading and I'm looking forward to posting the first battle report!