Dutch Marines for 1940 Chain of Command - The Rotterdam Project Part 1

In an attempt to provide myself with both encouragement and impetus I'm going to try and blog my progress on these. They were a Christmas present to myself and I'm hoping to get them done by the New Year - that will be 2020 before some wit asks :-)

The platoon consists of three squads of 12 men each, plus an officer. There are 2 spare officers that will be painted at the same time. I also have some Regular Army support weapons, but they will be in different uniforms to the Marines so I will do them later along with the other support options. In total I have 39 figures to paint in 5 days.

So this morning just after sparrowfart I got started with the preliminaries - cleaning the models up. In truth there is not a lot to do here. The models are by May 1940 Miniatures - the only supplier of 28mm Dutch Marines as far as I am aware. I'll probably go into the "why" I decided on Dutch Marines at some point later. The models are clean and almost flash free. There are some minor mould lines and some flash, mainly in the gaps on the figures that are firing rifles from the shoulder between the crook of the arm and the rifle, but it cleans up quickly. The models themselves are very nicely detailed and proportioned and the metal is good quality - I had one rifle lose it's foresight during clean up , other than that they are very nice models indeed.

In fact I probably spent more time on the pennies I intend to use as bases. The cunning plan is to store and transport the Dutch on magnetic sheet so the pennies which are ferrous will hold them in place. Actually not all 1p coins are ferrous so I checked the selected ones first just to be sure.  In the past I have had some problems with paint lifting from the edges of coins I have used to base figures on. A little while ago I asked for advice on Facebook and was told (by non other than Derek "Del" Hodge) that it helped if you roughened the edges with a file. This I did. I also washed the coins in soapy water - I never really thought of this before but when you think about it most of them will be filthy and covered in God knows what (yuk).

Lastly I glued the figures to the pennies using pva - with the likeness of HM The Queen face down. This isn't because I don't want to be arrested and charged with some sort of treason, or because I am a rabid Republican (which I am, but personally I don't have anything against her as an individual, but think the idea of the Monarchy is stupidly outdated). No the reason I stuck them to the reverse is because the patters on the reverse seem to give the glue something to work on better than old Liz.  One pose - a kneeling one, did not fit a penny so ended up on 2p pieces, and there is also a Lewis gun team that will have to be based as a pair on an mdf base and then some magnetic strip added later.

So that took just over three hours, with regular breaks for tea and a breakfast stop for a bacon butty. Once they're dry the next step will be to add sand to the bases, then spray the undercoat.