I bought a pack of the new ACW Fed shooting. Man they are beautiful. Now if only I didnt have 15mm armies.
I feel much the same about the Napoleonics. :(
:-bd
You can always sell your 15’s to fund a 10mm project. That’s what I did.
Nah, some of them are nearly forty years old. Aside from the pitance I'd get for them, they're old friends. :-B
I hadn't played my 15mm ACW in a while and pulled them out to try them with Black Powder for something new from the F&F regime they were doing for about 20 years. Couldn't get motivated. Gonna sell them. Just bought 2400 new Pendraken and Blaze Away to replace them. :o Need about 600 more....plan to do Sharpsburg at the regement level.
Tim
Quote from: Bart of the North on 04 October 2012, 04:02:23 AM
I hadn't played my 15mm ACW in a while and pulled them out to try them with Black Powder for something new from the F&F regime they were doing for about 20 years. Couldn't get motivated. Gonna sell them. Just bought 2400 new Pendraken and Blaze Away to replace them. :o Need about 600 more....plan to do Sharpsburg at the regement level.
Tim
That’s a lot of painting! It’s taken me almost two years to paint that many.
Well I did 600 Boers last month in batches of about 100 and 160 Brits as well. That gave me the confidence to beleive that i could do the same with rebs and yanks as they are quite similar to Boers and Brits respectively. All of the Boers uniquely dressed. The Brits are sprayed khaki and painted on things only.
I've been trying to stop painting 10s with 28mm mentality. No shading, dry brushing washes etc. Perhaps most important NO touch up unless gross slips. That slowed me down at first but found I got careful real quick and the speed picked up quickly. I simply kept a clean cup of water and a 000 brush available to wipe off a mistake before it dried.
I also sorted all figures by pose, mouned them on tongue depressors putting only 6 figures per stick to give me plenty of room to manouver around. I precisely spaced and positioned the figures EXACTLY in the same orientation. This care in positioning really key for my speed as it allows me to really paint in a steady cadence, painting only one feature at a time. Face, face , face , etc. Right hand, right hand, right hand, etc. Left hand, left hand, left hand, left hand, etc......next stick.
I did the Boers (and will do the Confederates) by priming in 4 colours, evenly speading the poses amongst the prime colours. That let's the same paint dry to a slightly different shade by prime colour. It also allowed the sticks to act as a coding aid to rotate paint colours. I took a count of sticks found that I was running about 7-9 sticks per pose. I picked that number of shades of gray and brown and painted the left three on one primer colour with one of the paint shades and the right three with another.
I did a similar thing with coat/vests except I painted six different colours per stick. After this I did the colours of everything else in the order that minimized my time needed in being careful so as not to slop paint on something that was already painted. Some poses meant belts before rifles others were reversed. It became apparent what the order would be real quickly.
Finished with hats, rotating a different shade or colour every two figures through the whole lot. The result was each Boer being as unique as a snowflake.
Since I didn't shade, dry brush, line etc. I did this at the end with polyurethane based stain....in my case Army Painter Softtone. Little figures tend to not reflect light very well so light stain is about all that works. Also no dipping. A light brush on, wait 60 seconds and sop it of with an old brush that I quickly clean in laquer thinner every couple of figures.
Look, I've been painting a long time and have always been slower than molasses in winter. Never finishing anything because of how slow I painted and finding the latest new and shiny project because of it and not finishing it either. I was about to get rid of thousands of dollars worth of 10s and 28s and simply stick to small skirmish sized 28mm projects despite the fact that I wanted large armies to game with and had only one (10mm WSS) and that took me over a year to paint half of the troops need for six players.
I decided to try this literally one last time and hit a home run. I got the results that pleased me and I'll be gaming large scale battles of 8-12,000 troops scaled to approx 1:20 for the Boer War by the end of November. I looked at my 15mm ACW wishing I could paint up that really big battle that got me gaming in the first place and new it wasnt going to happen. What i learned in the last 40 days is that i can do it with nice looking figures and do it fast. So I said what the heck make another lead investmen. Buy what you need to make a really pectaculr looking version of Sharpsburg.t......for the first time, you know with high certainty that you'll be able to complete the project in less than a year and gaming in less than three month. And that's why I started painting figures again back in 1990 for in the first place.
Tim
Love to see all those figures on a table when they're done Tim !
Cheers - Phil.
Thanks for the painting tips.
I have been working on 400 odd WSS Imperials and have learnt a few tricks. I'll keep your ideas in mind if and when I begin the 19th Century projects.