Friday, July 18, 2008

The armies get buffed up

Her royal highness (ie, my fiancée) came down ill on the last weekend, or at least felt under the weather enough to doze on the sofa for most of the Sunday, so I had the day to my own devices. I made good use of it, by putting in a mammoth painting session which took up all the afternoon and evening (minus time to cook dinner and play the caring doctor role, naturally). I’m happy to report genuine progress!

Some of the first advice I ever got about painting figures was ‘do it in bulk.’ In other words, don’t paint a figure if you can paint a unit, and don’t paint a unit if you can paint two units. For my ongoing 6mm project, I organised out every remaining unit and stuck them down on the ice-lolly sticks I’m using as a painting mount. It’s the first time I’ve seen them en masse, and they did look very good – a genuine sense of bulk to them all. Still, as I left them with the PVA setting, I could turn my attentions to painting some 15mm.

As you’ll have seen from previous photos and posts, there is a small group of each army which has merely been undercoated up until now, and I have managed to complete all of them. The total runs to 40 Infantry figures and 16 Cavalry figures, covering various types of units and officers in both armies. On the quality scale A-Z they probably come in at around ‘U’ of something, but that wasn’t the point of it. I was aiming to do a basic paint-job, which would at least produce a respectable unit at a distance, and that’s been achieved within a single day. I’m pretty pleased, as I can finally say I’ve now got two entirely painted armies (those undercoated figures were really grating on me after a while).

I’ve based them simply enough like the others on painted card, and I just need to spread on some glue & pour on fake grass to complete the picture. I’ve also found some green card and measured out some name-labels for each regiment & commander, which I’ll be gluing to each unit’s base for ease of reference. All slightly dull perhaps, but solid and practical progress!

1 comment:

Bluebear Jeff said...

Yes, that sounds like definite progress. Congratulations!

Of course don't forget to pay occasional attention to Her Royal Highness . . . it always helps.

Paint your figures for "the table top" (as it sounds like you are doing) . . . you can always come back later if you feel the need to paint for the display cabinet.


-- Jeff