Pentti Sammallahti, Solovki,
White Sea, Russia, 1992/ White Sea, Vostroya, M41
2014 sees the beginning of a new army for me, an entirely new army I’ve never had a crack at before, one that will push my limits in both painting and modelling.
I’ll be doing Vostroyan First Born Infantry, Vostroyan Armoured, and Imperial Navy Airborne sections of an Imperial Guard army, all correctly organised. To add an extra dimension and longevity, I’ve not decided on the regiments yet, but they’ll all have nicknames, along the lines of the Vostroyan 9th the Old Irascibles, and all the vehicles will be named and have the correct numbers and decals on them. This will be a true labour of love.
‘Ere comrade, you got any marshmallows?
Given the Vostroyan First Born are from a cold, ice world, I decided I’d go to town on these and add scenic bases. I’d seen a lot around the place in different stores and websites but I’d noticed Element had re-jigged the base section of their website. As they’re always my first port of call price wise, and Byron having offered me a whole lot lot of painting and modelling advice, I set to work looking for iced earth so to speak.
The website splits the bases down in to several categories, I was after the GW style bases, which can all be found here. There’s an absolute tonne of different kinds, I needed snow and ice, while there wasn’t any instantly visible, I found them in the shale section however, here.
They looked just the job, solid resin bases the correct size for gaming, but with a lot of life to them, so i grabbed a load, £3.60 for 5 standard sizes seemed pretty good value.
Ice, Ice baby!
As always with Element, they arrived within 2 days, and on opening them I was pretty stoked, these were better that id expected, the resin is akin to the stuff they make Dystopian Wars minis out of, really solid, hard wearing and highly textured. I forgot to get a pic of one as it came out of the blister but here’s one undercoated. I had to do zero filing or cleaning up on these things either, it should be noted.
This is a standard infantry base, next to a larger dreadnaught sized one, both of equally high quality.
The bases themselves are from a polish company called Miro Art Studios it seems, and Ill be checking out more of their range if the quality of these bases is a guide.
They took the Vallejo primer nicely, sprayed on with my airbrush, so I’d best go get painting. The plan is, to get the stone dry brushed up as its got a lot of texture, paint the snow white, base the modes with pins then flow snow flock over the snow and around the models themselves using army painter snow mixed with pva glue for that drifted freshly laid look.
I’ll leave you with Ice Breaker by the sadly now defunct Red Stars Parade. You can download the whole EP for free if you dig it.