Come on you Aussies....Pacific Chain of Command

My regular group of gaming friends are mainly board game players.  Wargamers, but board gamers rather than miniatures.  Many have commented on the miniatures games I've run at our monthly meeting at Paddington RSL in Sydney and several have expressed an interest in playing something in the Pacific.  So with this in mind I'm putting together an Australian and Japanese platoon with some supports (and scenery, of course).  I searched for 20mm figures and found a few Australian sets out there, but the most comprehensive seemed to be from Eureka.  I must say I had a few reservations about the Australians based on the Eureka website, some of the proportions looked a bit off.  In particular large heads and some of the faces seemed very caricatured.  On the plus side they had sets with helmets and with slouch hats and my thinking was these would also work as British for Burma, including Chindits.

First off I started on the figures with helmets.  My hunch was right on some of the proportions.  Not all figures, but some have to my mind horribly caricatured faces; heads that are too big and helmets that are too small.  Then there are others that I really like, so it's a mixed batch.   I also wanted to hold final judgement until I had some paint on them. Overall then, with the exception of one or two figures I'm happy with the way they look.

My order included the bren teams in slouch hats (I had ordered them in helmets), but I so liked these figures I was happy to keep them.  The slouch hats either hide the large heads or have been sculpted differently, either way these figures look much better proportioned.  I have an order of more figures on the way, this time with slouch hats, so I'll be interested to see if this applies to those figures as well.

Interestingly the Japanese don't seem to suffer from the same problem despite being from the same sculpture, the only figures with over sized heads are the NCO/Officers.

So here are some work in progress pictures of the first two sections.  I'm particularly happy with the way the bases have turned out.

A Senior leader, Junior Leader and section with some initial paint on.

Figures painted and first stage of flocking finished. 

Bases and figures finished.  Two sections plus a Senior Leader ready for the table.

The full platoon in various states of painting.  

Last, but not least, I've carried out an initial trial for my first Japanese figure to try and get the uniform colour the way I want it.  The Vallejo Japanese uniform mix is way too yellow to my mind and I'm looking for something more Khaki.  This is heading in the right direction:

"Banzai!"