My modular North African table is progressing slowly. Four of the six basic tiles are assembled and two of them are primed and ready for painting. Just a little more patching to do on the other two and they’ll get primed this week. I’ve figured out a paint scheme for the cliff faces but I’m still undecided on how to paint the sand areas.

We actually played a game on them last week just as a bare table without additional terrain and they seem to work ok. Some additional terrain is definitely needed, but I’m working on that as well.

Well, all four remaining contestants in the Pityak Midwinter Modelling Madness competition decided to end it half way through. Mainly because I think we’d all got a bit sick of furiously painting to a deadline and we didn’t get as much feedback from the audience as we’d hoped!

At any rate we all promised we’d post the progress we’d made so far. Here is my 1500pts Flames of War British/NZer force at the moment. It breaks down into painted versus half painted as follows:

Painted:

• 1 x Infantry Rifle platoon.
• 3 x Humber II Armored cars.
• 3 x Stuart ‘Honey’ unit.

Half painted:

• 1 Rifle platoon has 3 half painted large Infantry bases to go.
• 3 of 4 x 25pdrs and gun teams painted. 1 Obsvr White scout car painted. 2 Quad tractors painted. None of the staff or HQ painted.
• 2 of 4 x 6pdr Portees and gun teams painted.
• 1 Rifle platoon is mostly unpainted. Started painting HQ and support teams.
• 2 x 17/25pdr ‘Pheasants’, gun teams and 2 Quad tractors to be painted.
• CiC and SiC HQ teams half painted

I aim to complete this lot before Xmas and I believe that’s entirely feasible. The 6pdr Portees and 17/25 Pheasants may be painted by the end of October. Then it’s just the poor bloody Infantry and all the rather dull transports to finish off in November/December.

I have some vague plans to create a few 15mm scale German tents for a little airfield on the future North African table and I stumbled across www.tentsmiths.com, a US company that makes full replicas of various tents of the ages, including WWII period tents.

And www.zeltbahn.net is an entire site dedicated to detailing the standard WWII German troop tent or ‘zeltbahn shelter quarters’, although it’s lacking in decent photos! Fortunately Google image search turns up a few.