White Lightning

One of the Hammer’s Slammers outfits that has benefited from our slew of releases over the last six months or so has been the Lightning Division. This unit started out equipped with tracked armour, but around 340TW they began the process of upgrading them with more advanced blower tanks. I’ve already painted up a pair of detachments of the latter, but with the release of the new Fauchard APC and Falchion light tank I wanted to add some of the older tracked elements.

I also fancied painting a different colour scheme to the blue/yellow/grey of the blowers. I had a simple snow camouflage in mind, white stripes over a grey base. The plan was to utilise Blu-tack masking, spraying the models grey first then masking off stripes with adhesive putty before spraying white. But when the day came, I couldn’t find any Blu-tack! Instead I had to improvise, and instead resorted to tearing up strips of sticky labels (just plain address labels taken from the printer). These had just enough tack to stick to the models for long enough to spray the white camouflage coat, and didn’t pull up any paint when I removed them. For an emergency measure, I was pretty pleased with the results in the end.

The rest of the painting was fairly straightforward – I picked out some of the stowage in brighter colours for a bit of contrast, painted the crew, guns and tracks, then I was just about there. The vehicles got there usual cost of Army Painter strong tone Quickshade, and were left to dry overnight (I sit them on greaseproof paper so they don’t stick) before varnishing with Tamiya Flat Clear. Unfortunately I was low on stocks of Lightning Division decals, so markings will have to wait a little while…

If anyone has read the December 2018 issue of Miniature Wargames magazine, you’ll see both of my Lightning Division forces – tracked and blower – in action. You can also read about how badly it went for most of them, and my legendary awful dice rolling…