Big Spanish Civil War Project Part 1: International Brigade

 For several years, I've been really interested in the Spanish Civil War. It's a really interesting era of history, with so many different ideologies and personalities clashing. It's perfect for wargamers, both for these reasons and because of the range of unusual troops players can use.

A few months back, I decided I'd make a Spanish Republican army for Hordes of the Things, as it's my major ruleset. It wasn't long before I had another idea, though. I decided I was going to paint both sides of the war. I'll probably use them for solo games, but not exclusively. The models I'm using are 15mm Peter Pig. 

As a goal, I've decided to paint enough models to fight the example scenario at the end of the Osprey rulebook "A World Aflame". This is the Battle of Jarama, in February 1937. 

The first batch of models I painted was a company of International Brigade troops. These were people who came from all over the world to fight for the Second Spanish Republic against the Nationalist rebellion. They were organised by the Soviet Communist Party, something which would make France and Britain view the Republic in a negative light. They're particularly interesting to me because they represent the British Battalion at the Jarama, which contained many volunteers from my own country, Ireland.

A group picture of the whole company

 

Each group of figures is on a 3cm square base. It's a fairly generic basing scheme, as I'd like to try different rulesets. They are based in the same way as the Balagan Blog recommends for Crossfire. I've also made labels for each base in a style similar to his. Thank you for these ideas 😊

Individually based figures

Since A World Aflame is the ruleset I'm going to try out first, I based some models individually. These are message runners, medics, forward observers (for Crossfire) and squad leaders. 

Company Commander and HMG

Like most of my stuff, I painted the flag on the command stand. I first made the structure of the flag from an aluminium drink can. Then I printed the flag I wanted to replicate, and painted over it to give it a "scale lighting" effect.

Three squads / platoons.

Not much to say about these really. I'm really happy with them.

At the start, I wasn't mad about Peter Pig figures, but as I've painted them I've started to really like them. They are quite small, even for 15mm, but they have excellent detail. The faces are especially good, and are even better on the batch of Nationalists I've just started working on.

In relation to the Spanish Civil War, today is the anniversary of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica (Gernika). This was an outrage which was unfortunately only the first of many of its kind.