The four day plan: Days 1 & 2
Day 1 : Preparation
Take 15 miniatures and do the general preparation work filing off all the mould lines and flattening the bases. Why 15 miniatures? Well that’s the batch size that gives 5 bases (3 figures per base). It’s worth nothing that I’ll tag on the odd figure here, so I might add the disordered marker for the unit, (a dead infantryman), or maybe 4 Artillery personnel.
Then I glued them onto a wooden stick so I could hold them while painting. A word of warning though … in the picture it shows 5 figures on each stick … this is too many. I later used 2 figures on a stick half the size, (about 10cm / 4″).
Finally they get an undercoat of Vallejo Surface Primer – Black. Normally for 28mm figures I use a grey primer and only use Black (or White) if there is some specific benefit, e.g. I would use black as an undercoat if the figure was mostly armoured. However, for smaller scale figures the black undercoat creates a natural shade such that if you miss a bit white /grey will stand out much more than black.
Day 2: The Base Coats
The Rifle gets a strong drybrush of Vallejo Oily Steel 177. I do this first because some of the detail is so small it’s harder to paint on afterwards.
Next we put some Vallejo Andrea Blue 065 on the pants.
Finally its Vallejo Medium Fleshtone 021 for the skin and Vallejo Dark Prussian Blue 050 for the jacket.
That’s all for now, days 3 and 4 in part 3.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2015 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Wargaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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I am new to Vallejo acrylics for painting military miniatures. (I have used Fluoquil military model enamels for 40 years and only switched to acrylics this past winter)! I would like some information concerning the use of lacquers to complete the miniature painting process before the pieces may be used in wargaming.
You hear lots of advice concerning varnish for wargames figures and 50% of it is passed about as ‘the way to do it’ purely because that is what works for the person making the comment. What works for me is 1 or 2 coats of Vallejo Acrylic Matte Varnish. You have to be careful with the application as varnish tends to froth up a bit. The bubbles will disappear as long as you take care not letting any varnish pool too deeply.
Thank you for answering my question. I look forward to picking up additional painting tips from you in your future Blogs! My next project will be painting 28mm early Imperial Romans and their enemies. This will be an entirely new era, since my previous experience is with Napoleonic’s and American Civil War miniatures.