New books for the library.

Recently, I picked up some new books.  Two of a historical nature and one on mixing paint.  I thought the one on mixing paint would be of interest to some of you.

The First book is called "Color Mixing Recipes".  I picked this up at the local JoAnn's Craft store and it was on sale at 50% off.  I am color blind to certain colors and usually I have to be very precise in choosing the color paint I need for my figures.  So I tend to ask a lot of questions and go with a generally recommended color and then mix a shade and highlight from that.  What I like about this book is the process for mixing what you need.

The process is pretty easy.  You decide what color you need and then you read the number of "parts" of paint you need to make that color.

There's roughly 450 mixing choices and one of them is Khaki. :-)  They also have Gun Metal, Terracotta, Prussian Blue and a few other handy military colors.

In this photo you can see this color is made with 1 part White and 1 part phthalo blue.

This one is 1 speck of alizarin crimson and 3 parts phthalo yellow-green.

What does all this mean?  Well at the end of the book is this Mixing Grid. Each little box is 1 part of color.  A speck is defined as "small as a pin head".  The grid goes up to 20 parts.  I know this book will get lots of use by me.

The next book I picked up and started reading right away is "Blood on the Snow".  I've been looking for more and more books about WWI on the Eastern Front and this one was recently published.  I'm about half way through this one.  I am a little disappointed in how the books information has been presented.  The author has lumped tons of information together about the units in action and what section of the front they are on and it has gotten very confusing to follow.  Also his standard phrase, which appears about every third sentence is "the troops suffered severely from the lack of food, cold and poor winter gear."  Got it.  Lets move on and stop repeating it.

I'm looking forward to reading this one.  I'm planning on running some 15mm Fist Full of Tow 3 games at a 1:1 scale.