“A roll of the die” (week 12)

Right back the grind and time to “roll the die” to see what I get to paint this week, I shall probably do this for the next few weeks as I hope to get a few more boxes crossed out on my random painting generator (still love how grand that sounds considering it’s just three grotty bit’s of paper, two pennies and a couple of “poly” dice!) before I get distracted by something else. For anyone new to my blog there is a description of how this works here…

https://rantingsfromunderthewargamestable.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/a-roll-of-the-die-week-5/

Anyway the coins were tossed and a head and tail came up, meaning that this weeks items in line for being slapped in the face with a paintbrush were from “Merlins” list (all of Merlins list consists of figures from my reckless spending spree at “Irregular miniatures” on “A Very British Civil War” figures), so out came the D20 and the result was….

Box 19 (4x Policemen firing rifle and 1x Police officer)

As I intend to continue with my quest to rid the world of two pence pieces I began by gluing the figures to these, I added a couple of small squares of card between the base of the figures and the coin to raise them up slightly so they match the others in my collection, then the bases were built up with “Tetrion” all purpose filler to blend the figure base into the edge of the coin. Next they were given their customary coating of matt black spray paint.

Once dry and touched up where the spray had missed they were given a liberal dry-brushing with royal blue and the “to be” black bits were re-coated, this included boots, belts and the metallic bits at the top of the rifles. Talking of these, next I highlighted the said tops of the rifles along with painting in the helmet badges, belt buckles and buttons with chain-mail. Next the wooden portions of the rifles and the officer’s truncheon were painted chocolate brown before being highlighted in butternut. Flesh came next, a base coat of “red Indian flesh” was highlighted with “continental flesh” (thanks colour party list!) after I had added the eyes (I usually paint these over sized and then close them slightly with the highlight colour), I then took the black again and carefully painted in the chin straps for their helmets and their wrist bands (adding the white stripes to these is not something I can write about in such “gentile” circles as the language may turn rather blue, lets just say it wasn’t one of the more enjoyable aspects of painting these figures!!). Anyway I then highlighted the black boots and belts with dark grey and added the little bit of hair visible at the rear of the helmets in sand yellow (once again as I have quite a few policemen to paint in batches I can give each batch different colour hair rather than messing about doing different colour hair on individual figures.

Next day they were all given a coat of Quickshade and the day after this the bases were first painted in chocolate brown before this was given a heavy dry-bushing of khaki and a lighter dry-brush with coffee, then areas were picked out in scenic green and these areas were then “flocked” with autumn mix “hairy grass”. Finally they were sprayed with matt varnish. Now I just want to apologise for the quality of the photographs this week, it’s because the weather has been so dark and grotty that I’ve really struggled with getting a decent amount of light into them, so sorry!  Oh well another five done, still quite a few to go (I’m not going to count them as I’ll only get depressed). Time to roll again.

Till next time, Cheers Roger.