British 8th Army start: Supermarine Spitfire for Bolt Action

After finishing my US 1000 point army for Bolt Action, my friend John got a hold of some new Perry miniatures, the British 8 army box. He also bought some Perry Germans and we decided to build and paint two armies, based in Northern Africa in the early forties.

I decided on the British and I have been working on my first squad of ten troopers, and they are almost done. In the meantime I built and painted a Spitfire for the army, basically a fancy phantom model that doesn't really have a role in Bolt Action, but looks cool. We use the plane with the forward observer so we can get some fire come down on the enemy's heads.

I picked up this box set from Airfix: 1:72 aifrcaft of the aces.

It comes with three planes: a Messerschmitt BF109, a P51 Mustang and the Supermarine Spitfire in an early rendition, the MK1a. It cost me about 30 bucks and came with paints, surprisingly good quality actually and with good colors and with a few brushes.

Anyway, for my desert army I painted the Spitfire up in desert camo. Here's the camo (but not color) pattern I copied:

And here's the model I just finished. I tried to make him look a bit weathered as well:

Of course the Airfix kit doesn't have the correct decals for the Northern Africa campaign and since the model will not really play a role in the game and is more for good looks, I decided not to follow through and purchase correct decals. Interesting to note is that in a lot of WW2 images, the Spits in the desert didn't have letter markings on the bodies, like above and below:

Here's a desert pattern from Eduard, that does include letters, but blue ones, outlined with white. 

You can see that the color scheme in the original color picture and the one above is more yellow, but the one below has more muted colors and that is what I went for in my model, since that fits better with the troops.

 I based the model on a long, 14 inch bamboo skewer, with a resin 60mm base. It's very stable and it's height makes it look great with 28mm models. Warlord has also advised to use 1/72 models for the game.

The airfix kit comes with the blue paint needed for the bottom and in my collection of Games Workshop paints, I could not find the right one; i was glad for the little mini cup of blueish paint!

And here are my palettes, just like everyone elses I presume! Trying to find the right colors takes some time.

SC Mike