Blood, Guts, & Glory Painting Challenge: The Aftermath

Blood, Guts, & Glory

Blood, Guts, & Glory Painting Challenge:
The Aftermath

To celebrate the release of Blood, Guts, & Glory the members of the Battlefront Studio decided to hold a 24-hour painting challenge themed around the forces available in the new book. However, some people decided to take advance of opportunity to either complete other painting projects that had been haunting them for some time or get ahead for future projects Battlefront had planned.

In this series of articles we share with you the experiences that took place during these 24-hours.

Learn more about Blood, Guts, & Glory here...
Learn more about the American forces in the 24-hour painting challenge here...

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Sean Goodison
Well the challenge is over and I stuck to my plan, kept focused, and successfully completed my bunch of vehicles. I even had enough time left at the end to apply decals, which was something I hadn't planned on doing. The only downside to having a (mostly) completed army around here is that you might get asked to write an article for Wargames Illustrated. My Tank Destroyer company will be appearing in issue 296.

Below: The vehicles of Sean' Task Force A.
Sean's Task Force A
I really enjoyed the experience and the sense of accomplishment (mixed with relief) when it was done. Having a big group involved made all the difference, as there was always an interesting conversation or shenanigan taking place.

~ Sean.

Casey Davies
I started the morning with all kinds of enthusiasm. Unfortunately I ran into trouble almost immediately, with my airbrush clogging up, so I lost 20 minutes straight away while I cleaned it and re-setup.

The first step was to get everything painted Heer Green and give it a magic wash. I didn’t realise that it was going to take me the better part of two and a half hours to get this done. I spent the time waiting for the magic wash to dry capturing some footage of everyone hard at work. About an hour later I was ready to begin masking.

When I did my sample tank I didn’t time how long it took to apply the salt mask, thinking that it didn’t really matter how long it took as I’d undoubtedly get quicker as I did more of it. Again, it’s funny how much longer these things take than you expect.

I masked the tanks in batches of five and gave them a light spray of an off-white followed by white. I did them in batches because experience has shown that white paint thickens and clogs the airbrush so it needs more regular cleaning. Also, unfortunately, in my attempts to speed up the process, my technique suffered a little and I felt that I’d applied the white paint too thickly, so that there wasn’t enough of the original colour showing.


By the time I finished putting the white on the fifteen Shermans it was 5pm.

Time to make my first hard decision. I realised that there was no way i would be able to complete anything if i continued with salt masking the half-tracks, so I decided to put the half-tracks aside and concentrate solely on the tanks. If I managed to finish them I’d go back and work on them later.

On the plus side though, if I manage to finish the tanks I can upgrade them to Veterans and still have a sizeable force that I can start playing some games with.

Below: Casey's Shermans.
Casey's Shermans
After Dinner I threw myself into weathering the Shermans. The main reason I weathered them so heavily was to tone down the vibrancy of the whitewash. If I’d applied a thinner coat of the white paint I wouldn’t have needed as much weathering.

The weathering itself consisted of an overall thin wash of Grease Brown, followed by some targeted streaky washes of Grease Brown, Dark Leather and Battledress Brown to simulate dirt and rust streaks. Again this took longer than I thought, taking till well after midnight to complete.

So at about 2am I’d finished the hulls apart from tools, stowage and machine-guns, so I moved onto my least favourite part of painting tanks, the tracks.

I didn’t actually end up getting the track finished. I managed to apply a coat of Black grey to all the tracks and give them a magic wash. By now it was 5am and I was pretty much broken and couldn’t face finishing the tracks properly. They had a coat of paint on them and that was enough for now.

With only a few hours to go, I knew wasn’t going to get everything finished, I was determined to at least get the base colours down for everything. All that was left was the .50 cals and the tools on the engine deck. I was looking good to get this done until about 7am when I got to the point where I couldn’t focus on my brush and decided to stop before I did anything bad to the models.

The 24 hour painting challenge certainly was hard work. It was a brilliant team building exercise, and I got to know the guys from the studio that much better.

That said, I wasn’t 100% happy with the outcome, the result wasn’t too bad, just not up to my usual standard. I definitely want to do another 24 hour challenge, although I think that next time I won’t go into it expecting to finish an army, instead I think I’ll paint a platoon at a time as well as I can and be happy with whatever I achieve.

I haven’t done any more work on the army since the painting challenge; it’s now gone on to the end of my painting list. I’m currently finishing the last platoon of my Shtraf Batalon, a 122mm artillery battery for my Late-war Guards KV-1e army, and my Late-war Schwere Panzerkompanie, after that’s done I’ll get round to finishing and expanding my Americans.

~ Casey.

Mike Haycock
As it turned out I got pretty close I have the Pioneers, the Hungarian artillery and the German 105 artillery painted/based but not flocked. The heavy anti-tank I have the crew done but not the guns. Overall, it was fun I did get a lot painted and as I need them all done as the army had its first outing at the New Zealand National competition on April 6 2012 so it was a huge boost getting the army ready for that event.


~ Mike.
Below: The fruits of Mike's labour during the course of the 24 hours.
The fruits of Mike's labourduring the course of the 24 hours
Mark Hazell
Hoorah!  I finished everything I set out to paint.  I’ll be honest; at about 3am I was thinking to myself how nice it would be to lie down under the table and go to sleep but after caffeine shot I managed to keep myself going till the end.

Below: Mark's Shermans.
Mark's Shermans
Looking back at the experience, I had a lot of fun. There was lots of good natured joking amongst everyone.  Late into the night, the conversation plunged into sleep deprivation inspired madness but it was all good fun.  If we do another 24 hour event I’ll definitely sign myself up because even if you don’t finish what you wanted to paint you will have made a really good dent into a new army which you can finish off at a later date.

~ Mark.
Phil Yates
That was certainly an event! I actually did better than I expected. The Panzer IV/70 tank-hunters are done except for the decals (I decided that I'd be better off doing them when more awake!) The assault rifle-armed infantry platoon is done. Eleven half-tracks are assembled, undercoated, and painting has begun on the wheels and tracks.

Below: Phil's Panzer IV L/70 (V).
Phil's Panzer IV L/70 (V)
I had fun and enjoyed the opportunity to see how other people approached some aspects of painting. I learned a bit about painting disc camouflage (the 'ambush' scheme used on Panzer IV/70 tank-hunters) as I decided to try it out on one of my vehicles. I figured that the scheme was first used about the time the brigade went into action, and decided that one late-arriving vehicle could have that scheme.
Below: Phil's Half-tracks.
Phil's Half-tracks

Overall, it was a good experience, but I think I'll wait until next year to do it again!

~ Phil.

Below: Phil's Infantry.
Phil's Infantry
The Best of the Rest
Marcelle's Cavalry
The Best of the Rest
Adam's Panthers
The Best of the Rest
Chris' Soviets
The Best of the Rest
Mike's Half-tracks
The Best of the Rest
James' Panzer IV Js
The Best of the Rest
Wayne's Assorted Hungarians
The Best of the Rest
Micheal's Shermans
The Best of the Rest