Upgrading Pegasus Bridge

The Pegasus bridge comes pre-painted, but since the color is only on one edge of any given sheet, the model had a strange cell-shaded quality about it. What you see here is my first pass at upgrading that paint job. I wasn't sure where I wanted to go with it, but I knew it needed a dusting of grey to color in the dark laser cut edges. One thing always leads to another, and despite the fact that the bridge is not even ready for paint, I decided to paint up the warning stripes on the barrier. 

I intend to upgrade the bridge's detail as well, so using some green stuff and the diamond pattern of one of my sculpting tools I took a quick stab at doing some sandbags. If I were working at 28mm I would have used tobacco pouches soaked in glue, but there aren't any of those scale appropriate for this 20mm bridge. (1/72 scale as opposed to 1/56) I'm happy with how the sand bags turned out, which is good, since I have to create a lot of reinforced areas. The table will have two sets of zig-zag trenches with sandbanks along the top rim. The Germans dug those in to protect the banks. The circular sandbag sections will be movable, and should provide the German players the ability to setup different medium machine gun nests. Of course, if you reinforce and area and then swiftly loose control of it to a 3x larger force, it will only be that much harder to take it back. That is the idea at least. 

Does it make sense to partially paint stuff while the model is still being built? No. On the other hand, I enjoy this process more so since it gives me a glimpse of what the table will eventually look like. This is sort of like sketching. 

4Ground 20mm Pegasus Bridge and Cafe For Bolt Action

 It was only natural to want to do a Pegasus bridge board after painting my 20mm AB British paratroopers, so feeling a little experimental I decided to pick up my first two 4Ground MDF kits. What you see above are the kits as delivered with some additional paint and weathering on the cafe model. The bridge was a pretty rough build, since I did not realized there were replacement parts for the individual sections in the box, but the problems weren't so bad as to keep me from an ok model. I did have to do some creative construction of the superstructure, but I doubt the gaming group will care about the little incorrect details.

I've decided that I have to re-paint the bridge entirely in order to remove the weird cell shaded effect, but I think I can use the inherent shading to provide a sort of pre-shading. The cafe is a whole other story. I plan to weather it, but I can't decide to repaint it or not. The little touches I did like painting some random 'errors' on the model to make it look a little more natural helped, as did making the recesses in the roof dark colors rather than white, but I might just build the table first and see how the cafe integrates into it.

My next post will likely show an upgraded bridge, though I am eager to paint a crashed Horsa glider..