Last stroke for Harbin Kolinsky 2/0

Painted my very last piece of 15mm Polish army just a couple of minutes ago. Mindblowingly dull work painting the infantry, had to force myself to finish the last couple of infantry stands in a way that I haven't done for a long while. I won't paint more 15mm until I forget how awful it is. Playing Flames of War is amazingly fun, painting the models on the other hand is mental and artistic torture.

But the focus of this story should be on my little buddy - the Harbin Kolinsky 2/0 brush. Slightly smaller than a fine detail brush, this was my only small enough quality and non synthetic brush that  had left for the last couple of weeks. The store where I usually buy these had first run out of brushes, and after a few weeks I was told they had stopped selling them!

So I had but one non synthetic / non shitty brush to paint a LOT of 15mm models with.  This single brush got be through half my scout platoon, 1x 37mm AT, 1x 155mm artillery platoon, 1x HMG platoon and 14 infantry stands for my last Polish infantry platoon. In actual models that is 113 soldiers, 6 pieces of artillery and 3 hmgs!

This brush did all the layers except for the heavy duty undercoating and painting the bases themselves. Towards the end it was still in good enough shape but it had grown thin and probably lost 40% of its initial volume. This type of brush normally reserved for painting eyes and teeth pulled off an impressive feat.

I'll have pictures of the entire army up tomorrow as the army pictures always end up too dark when I have to take photos during the evening.

I hope to find replacement brushes on par with what I've been using (Harbin and Rotmarder Kolinsky). Truly exceptional brushes that were always cheap enough (36 SEK) to not make me worry about ruining them by accidently touching some wet spot with superglue or something on a model (the reason why I do not invest in super high quality expensive brushes).