FROM JohnB: Whats that coming over the hill is it a monster?

Nope its an AHPC wrap! Mind you "The Automatic" (welsh indie rock band) hit was a cracker Well I have had my best year at AHPC and its my third year on the trot signing up. With a photo splurge what have I learnt? I have again learnt a lot from the other 70 odd entrants plus their figure and basing ideas as well as some of their figure/painting combinations all inspiring me to buy and paint yet more figures but actually paint more! woohoo 700 plus points worth or 13 micro projects if you like. plus I started to do stand up painting! yep stood at a bar style bench set up and doing sprints - short paint sessions of 15 minutes - 45 minutes, which led to my mini paint palette method as I tended to use one colour.

ok this paint is 4 days old but the method does work on small amounts of paint used over say 24 hours oh and the tissue is meant to be kept wet!!!!! On with the results - I am particularly pleased that I painted the ECW Tumbling Dice unit, maybe that project will get a kick start now.

Finishing the 1848 Hungarian Steam Engine having scratch built it for AHPC15 was very satisfying. You need two airfix rockets.........and a lot of cursing.

The Irish Brigade unit using Strelets Louis XIVth range was also a hit - I have admired their range for a long time - too long and never painted any. Now that has been fixed maybe more will follow.

I hope you all have seen the error of your ways and realise that injection moulded plastics in 1/72 is the way to go - queue woops of laughter about this madness of mine. Seriously I hope you have all enjoyed painting what you like and love.

That said I am glad I painted my 40mm Vikings to celebrate Ian Kay's retirement at Irregular Miniatures - I am happy for him yet sad to see such a vast traditional figure range sail off into the sunset.

And I painted my first printed figures - Italian support weapons in 20mm from MarDav.

Plus ca Change! And I sorry for my Minion Peter who was hoping to see my French Dragoons completed - I am off to the allotment for the year so this is as far as I got! Lets hope those red monsters don't get me.

So a big thank you to everyone who took part and of course especially to Curt and all the minions and duel runners and anyone I have missed. Hope to be back in the 17th challenge later this year.

From JohnB: 20mm MarDav WW2 Italian Weapons Support Group (40 points)

Well I think this is the last posting from me - thanks to everyone involved and hopefully I will return with AHPC17. First up "the one that got away" 1/72 French Dragoons for the Wars of Louis XIVth around 1700 they are made by STRELETS a Ukrainian company still operating despite the Russian Invasion. The figures are produced using plastic injection moulding - a process popularised by Airfix back in the late 1950's. Ironically they compliment my earlier forces made up with Zvezda Russian Great Northern War figures which started my interest in this period back in 2010 when plastics were a cheap entry point to test a wargaming period out. Plastics in 1/72 are still a good deal £8 in the UK gets you about 40 infantry and 12 cavalry. or thats 20p infantry and cavalry 70p.

They come in boxes with nice artwork

only a small logo suggests the country of origin.

The sculpting is great for me and these recent products are now a match for a lot of metallics - AND THEY BOUNCE! Hopefully I will complete this unit soon and then post my AHPC stories on my wordpress blog site "the wargaming erratic". My last offering is a departure from my usual plastic injection mouldings and occasional metallics. This time its a resin product from MarDav of the UK.

The figures have fine layering so the material looks like its deposited. However they look fine painted up and at wargaming distance.

They are actually GOMBARDIANS for my FAUXTERRE wars - 1930 era in this case. I painted them in my chosen style for Italian green uniforms reference being the Osprey Greek Italian War of 1940 - they appear kind of blue green in the artwork. So I went with that. I have an anti tank gun, machine gun and light mortar all of which I inspected at UK Battleground Wargames show at Stockton, Teeside, last Autumn and bought them there and then. Pendraken run the show and this year went stateside for the first time - great products. And they get interesting traders to their free entry show. I think MarDav are mainly an online business so it was nice to see them in the flesh so to speak esepcially in terms of scale.

Basically they get a craft paint mid green base then Citadel CC warp lighting and militarum green(I did 50% of them without Militarum as an experiment) then dry brush Vallejo Air light green for aeroplanes! which actually comes out a bit blueish. The helmets just got militarum over warp lighting to provide contrast. Why? well for Italians it is the case that their helmets are different from the Russian and US "bowls". And I wanted to highlight that.

Points wise its 1 x 8 points for the anti tank gun and 8 x 4 points for the crews. TOTAL points = 40 points and one squirrel I believe. And that wraps up my highest AHPC score to date which simply shows I have been very productive this winter.

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Sylvain: Shotgun posts! Some infantry to add to your cavalry (that I can see lying around in the background). You invest a lot of love in this Fauxterre projectand it's makes your post very interesting to read. Great paint job on these miniatures! Bravissimo!