I just haven\'t got the hours worth of patience it takes. But I have discovered new hope, in the form of Battlefront Miniatures. Although designed for wargaming, the little tanks, planes, trucks, and men produced by Battlefront are perfect for short attention span modellers like myself.  In fact, I\'ve just completed by first effort: a Russian amphibious Jeep. Actually it is a Ford GPA Jeep, manufactured in the US and then lend-leased to the Russians. Here\'s the little beauty before I assembled it. It\'s three parts, a resin cast body, a metal windshield, and a little metal driver.

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Unassembled model next to a penny.


Wargaming miniatures don\'t have a scale as such. Instead they have a size. This one is 15mm, meaning a standard man is about 15mm tall. However, some details are not done in scale. This has little impact on this particular model, but some things such as machine guns that would be so small and thin as to be impractical are often made slightly bigger than would be realistic. Roughly, 15mm size is about 1/100 scale.

I began by gluing the windshield on and then spraying the jeep and the driver with a black undercoat. The paint job was very simple. The only technique I used was a bit of drybrushing on the jeep to highlight raised areas with a lighter green. All the other colours are just one layer, with a bit of splattered brown around the bottom to simulate mud. All told, I think I used 8 colours to paint the jeep and driver. The hardest part was the red star. I could have left this off, or probably bought a decal, but I figured I would give it a shot with freehand. Well, you can see the results, not the greatest, but not terrible. I\'m saying it was hastily painted on just before it was sent into battle.

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Finally, I glued a bit of railroad fake grass (or flocking) onto the base with regular old white glue.

All and all, it took just over an hour to assemble and paint my jeep, and I\'m pretty happy with the results. The other great thing about these models is that they are relatively inexpensive. A pack of three of these jeeps costs $22 New Zealand (or just over £8). Next time, I believe I might tackle some heavy armour.