Category Archives: Imperial Guard/Astra Militarum

Colonel Schaeffer’s Last Chancers – “Fingers” and “Scope”

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Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers - "Fingers" and "Scope"

It’s been quite a while since I’ve completed any of the Last Chancers, and so I took the opportunity this month to get this pair of models finished and off the desk after having been there for a loong time. One of the two continues the historical aspect of this group of models. “Fingers” here, who appears to from the “Bushmen of Serica” regiment is inspired in my opinion by Australian WWII troops. Lore-wise, “Fingers is an expert forager and petty thief who can get a hold of just about anything for a price.” I guess this is because to an unfortunately large number of people in the UK and US, Australians are all petty criminals who ride Kangaroos to work and dodge man-sized spiders and drop bears on the trip. Much like all Americans wear cowboy hats and walk around with an AR-15 and all Brits wear monocles and walk around with a cup of tea, and all Frenchmen wear those stripey shirts, a beret, a necklace of garlic while halding a baguette, and all Scots are kilt-wearing drunkards… 👀

Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers - "Fingers" and "Scope"

Anywho, the second model, “Scope” is a trained sniper and expert marksman. “His crime was going AWOL, for reasons unknown, but it is suspected to be related to the assassination of Chief Arbitrator Abraxtes.” So basically, he’s a sniper who snipes and maybe he sniped someone a bit important. Basically a Tabula Rasa/blank slate. Since he’s a sniper, I gave him a nice camo pattern loosely based on Flecktarn.

Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers - "Fingers" and "Scope"

And that’s that for this pair. As a collection of models, Fingers has some rockets in his backpack so he would have originally functioned as a loader model for Rocket Girl, though when these models were released that woul dhave had no actual in-game effects as Heavy Weapon teams were composed of two distinct models, one of which was the gunner with the big gun and the other funcitonally just being a rifleman in the squad. Not sure how that works these days with the multibased weapon teams. I haven’t played 40k for quite some time and Imperial Guard for even longer.

Hopefully it won’t take another 14 months before I get the next pair of these painted! There’s just Rocket Girl, Ox and the Colonel left – so a chance I could get them done before the end of 2023!

Colonel Schaeffer’s Last Chancers – “Grease Monkey” and “Hero”

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Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers - "Grease Monkey" and "Hero"

Another pair of Last Chancers up today for July, and we have another pair of models that couldn’t possibly offend anyone at all, ever. “Grease Monkey”, who is a vehicle driver guy, and “Hero”, who for some reason I always thought was some sort of disgraced Commissar type, as he’s always painted in a black outfit. So when I started working on this pair, as with all “individual” models, I started looking closely at Grease Monkey, deciding what colours to paint and where and when doing so, I began to notice details… his hat has a bit of a familiar style, with the roundel badge, and then the Y-harness on his back. Yes, this model is (loosely) based on a WWII German tanker.

Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers - "Grease Monkey" and "Hero"

So with that realisation, I decided to give him an overall scheme that fit in with my 15mm Afrika Korps. So with that, he got little details like dark pink Waffenfarbe piping on his collar and crusher cap, brown leather accoutrements, a 15th Panzer Division icon on his shoulder along with a tank IS number, and the overall uniform colour being appropriate for DAK tank crew. A paler European-looking flesh rather than a tanned flesh to represent him mostly being inside tanks – not exactly realistic for someone wearing the uniform of a desert force, but as I’ve said previously – I want to have a diversity of flesh tones in this little group.

Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers - "Grease Monkey" and "Hero"

“Hero” on the other hand… I feel like he may be more correctly called “Hiro”. I noticed while looking hard at the model that his facial characteristics looked Asian. That made sense, given how the other models in this set had elements of different nationalities. The sheathed Katana now had a more specific ken to it. Now I’m not nearly as familiar with WWII Japanese Uniforms as many others, but again, a little googling showed that many of the elements looked quite familiar when looked at through this specific lens – so with this in mind, I now had my colour scheme. This also informed my choice of flesh tone – looking for a warmer tanned tone, I used Vallejo Game Colour Elf Skintone as the base. Of course, the official ‘eavy Metal paintjobs of the day had the entire unit painted as Whitey McWhiteface – as was the style of the time.

Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers - "Grease Monkey" and "Hero"

I decided I didn’t need to add a bunch of bloodstains to Grease Monkey’s bandages, though I do have the option of doing that down the line if I change my mind (or paint another one of these down the line!) The german tank numbers worked out surprisingly well on the model, so that’s also something I might keep in my back pocket for other 40k models of different kinds down the line. Hiro’s weapon furniture was painted in a basic rifle “wood” brown to fit in with the IJA theme, while Monkey’s pistol didn’t really need the same attention, though I would likely have painted his weapon differently if it were a rifle.

Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers - "Grease Monkey" and "Hero"

So yeah, it ws quite surprising to me when I looked much more closely at these two to see that they’re actually both based on WWII Axis troops. I’m pretty sure that the remainder are all more generic, with the exception of one who I think is meant to be an Aussie – though I haven’t looked closely at the Colonel himself – and given the fact that he doesn’t look anything like Ahnold – he may turn out to be another xx-inspired model once I take that closer look – but that cap does look like it could be German!