I entered the pair of Coyote Light Walkers I painted up late last year into a painting competition and to my pleasant surprise ended up winning a 20% off voucher for Clockwork Goblin Miniatures which I decided to put towards one of their 15mm scale Grizzly Medium Walkers. The kit itself was a little more challenging to work on than the Coyotes but overall, it’s been another thoroughly enjoyable project to work on which also pushed my painting abilities in a couple of places as well.
Preamble
While the Coyotes were completely resin kits, the Grizzly is a resin/metal hybrid. As you can see in the image below, most of the larger parts are cast in resin, while the smaller details are in white metal. Now, I’m old enough to remember working with all metal models back before plastic and resin became more commonplace, and while there’s a certain nostalgia buzz affiliated with those earlier times, I much prefer resin and plastic kits these days – they’re easier to work with, the paint doesn’t chip off them when you so much as breathe near them, you don’t (or at least very rarely) need to pin anything to ensure bits won’t fall off… you get the picture.
Assembling the kit
Suffice it to say that I was a little apprehensive about getting the Grizzly assembled, but although there were a couple of minor sticking points during the build, for the most part it was fine.
The hatches for the cupolas took considerable and repeated filing to get them to fit and filing such small metal components was very fiddly. I considered modelling the hatches open more than once, but I prefer the look of ‘buttoned up’ armour if I’m honest.
The power cables on the rear were slightly too large for the location they’re meant to fit, though admittedly this was a relatively easy issue to sort as I used a modelling saw to cut them to a more appropriate size and then once I’d bent them to fit and glued them in place, I used some greenstuff to fill a couple of wee gaps.
However, fixing this led to me encountering another small issue, as the Grizzly is supplied with a small armour plate which is shown installed upon its’ derrière in the instructions for the kit (see below).
However, I found that if I attached it, it would clash with the power cables above it. After a little thought, I decided to just leave the plate off, reasoning that it the absence of the plate didn’t adversely affect the miniature, in my ‘headcanon’ perhaps it was just never installed on this particular Grizzly, or maybe the crew removed it for ease of maintenance or to save weight?
Painting
As I do with most projects, I took notes of the recipes I used when painting the Coyotes, so the plan for painting the Grizzly was to use these to speed things up. This went to plan mostly, though once the basecoats were in place, I was slightly overzealous in applying the shading wash. I compounded this error by then being a little heavy handed when tidying up the green of some of the armour plates but some careful glazing remedied both issues thankfully. On reflection, needing to glaze the armour actually provided a much more satisfying finished result to the model as it meant that the tones of the olive drab are richer and more varied in saturation which given the much larger areas of flat surfaces on the Grizzly is no bad thing I don’t think.
Pretty much everything else was done the same as with the Coyotes, though the canvas cover on the mantlet of the 75mm gun represented an opportunity to add some different texture to the miniature and I’ve tried to paint it to look used but not excessively worn, in keeping with the overall look of the Walker.
Roughly midway through the painting, I began thinking about what kind of markings I’d be applying to the model and following the theme I’d established on the light walkers, decided I’d go with an identification number and simple symbol and colour stripe. At around the same time, I was researching performers of the late 40s with a view to finding a ‘pet name’ for the Grizzly which led to me discovering Theresa O’Shea, who called herself Two Ton Tessie… now it just so happens that a M4A3E8 weighed around 32 tons (if I’ve found reliable sources during my research) and a Grizzly is essentially a walking Sherman. 32 would also sit nicely upon the left shoulder plate of the Walker as well, so ’32 Ton Tessie’ was born – I like to think that the crew saw the identification number having seen or heard Tessie perform and the Walker essentially named itself.
Once the painting was complete, I based the Grizzly to match the Coyotes and as you can see in the side by side image below, it sits quite nicely alongside it’s smaller cousins.
So, with the Grizzly complete, what's next? Well, I’d like to add some Armoured Infantry to the walkers once Clockwork Goblin release them, but these are still a little while off being available I think. In the meantime though, they were kind enough to send me a 15mm scale Sherman Tesla Turret that I think might look good on an M4A3E8 chassis…
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