Back to the Land for #FEMbruary 2019

Almost finished my FEMbruary female figure painting challenges for 2019.

Bad Squiddo 28mm figures of Land Girls at Work (left) and last year’s figures Land Girls at Rest – still  working out how to group and display them. 

The new figures for my 2019 FEMbruary painting challenge are Annie Norman’s excellent WW2 Land Girls series – this year I chose the  Land Girls at Work set, sculpted by Alan Marsh.
https://badsquiddogames.com/shop#!/WW2
A tractor is newly available in 28mm for this Land Girl range.

To match last year’s effort, I kept with my usual  shiny  toy soldier style of painting, right down to the pink cheek dots and glossy acrylic paint. This extends to shiny green bases rather than flock. A restricted gloss palette but a cheerful one!

I like the cartoonish element that comes out with this paint style, it is not quite Jane, slightly more Peter Firmin Noggin the Nog / Ivor the Engine for some reason.

Each figure looks like she has a real character. You can name them with suitable 1940s names in your own time.

Grouped together, I wonder what they are chatting about or thinking?

Land Girls at Work on a possible display base from a fence post cap.

I am thinking possibly of putting these figures in for my local Spring Flower Show in a couple of weeks time under the rarely competed for adult craft section (with very few male entries). There is a local connection – many  Land Girls were trained and worked in my Southwest UK area on the hundreds of small market gardens that were once around.

To get an idea how this might work, I bought a couple of wooden fence post caps as simple bases and painted them sap green (the dark green colour of land girl jumpers). A few more coats may be required to deepen the colour.

The Land Army lapel reproduction badges come from CJ Medals online http://www.cjmedals.co.uk

Beautifully animated castings, a joy to paint. Lovely detail like the spud sack.

The centre figure looking up – for aeroplanes? – is my favourite of the new figures, although the one carrying a load of straw is well animated too.

Last Year’s 2018 FEMbruary challenge rebased and relaxing in the shade under a tree. The tree is a plastic one from the recently featured 54mm Fantasy Figures set, painted toy soldier gloss to match the figures.

The addition of a hay stook (once the Mexican woman’s broom from Steve Weston’s   Mexican Peasants) and a plastic tree from a recent fantasy figures True Legends set add something to the scene.

The finer details of eyes, lips  and eyebrows were inked in with paint on finely sharpened cocktail sticks.

I have moved the figures round on the bases several times to get the right arrangement. Still not sure, especially as some of the Land Girl figures could easily intermix between the two rest and work sets.

I have a couple of  54mm Britain’s type Land Girls for repair that gave me ideas for the shiny gloss colour palette.

These three 54mm hollowcast lead Women’s Land Army tractor drivers are in need of careful repair.

FEMbruary finishing touches?

When Alex at Leadballoony set this year’s challenge,

https://leadballoony.com/2019/01/31/more-scumbos-and-the-fembruary-challenge/
he said he would round it all up by March 8th International Women’s History Day https://www.internationalwomensday.com

Unfinished Russian WW2 women’s command pack still in the painting table. 

I still have the Bad Squiddo 28mm Russian Women of WW2 Command set to put the finishing touches to. I found these less interesting to paint, well sculpted as they are, as shades of khaki green just aren’t my thing really at the moment. I shall feature them again when finished in the next week or two.

Posted by Mark, Man of TIN on March 2nd 2019.