“Pruss Ganged!”

I don’t really know how this happened, I was all set to do another of my “roll of the die” weeks and pull something out of one of my draws to paint up for this weeks blog posting when I got called into Myles’s bedroom (I should have smelled a rat there and then as I never! get invited into there). He wanted to ask my advise about the “Dystopian Wars” naval miniatures he’d bought last year, he had both “Prussian Empire” and “Covenant Of Antarctica” Battle groups (with a couple of aditional larger ships for each, and somehow (I really don’t quite know how) before I knew it I was buying the “Prussian’s” off of him and agreeing to paint them up!! Now I should have suspected something like this was on his devious mind all along when he bought the “Prussian’s” as he’d innocently asked me “If you did a force who would you pick?” My immediate answer was the “Prussian’s” (because they’ve got a BIG robot, sad I know but I like robots!). Yes the miniatures are very nice and the game looks interesting but they aren’t cheap and I really didn’t want to start yet another project before I got some of the others finished. Still I’m commited now and so I’ve decided not to add these to my “random painting generator” system but will instead only paint the same number and class of ships the Myles himself gets painted.

Hence I found myself sitting staring at the first three “Uhlan Class Cruisers” wondering where to start with their painting, I did’t want anything to complicated (as there are quite a few of them to paint in total) and I needed something that would work on both the little (40mm long) and larger (150mm long) ships, so much head stratching ensued. They had been undercoated with matt black months ago (back when Myles was going to paint them!). So I began as usual with a dry-brushing of chain-mail as this would not only form the basis of any further colouration but would also bring out the detail. Next I decided to paint in the decks so an undercoat of chocolate brown was applied and then a highligh of leather brown was painted over this (strangely Myles had used exactly the same colours to do his decks completely unbeknown to me). Then I painted the hulls and gun turrets in dark grey before adding wide diagonal stripes of light grey and black. Now these I didn’t want to be thick solid lines of colour but more blended and indistinct, so using a bigger brush (No2 to be exact) I dry-brushed these on, and then as I was so pleased with the effect I’d got with the camoflage pattern I’d paintred onto the “Hitlerbot” figure a couple of weeks back I decided to add some dots in coffee. Finally, though I was pleased with the general look of the ships I thought they could do with a little brightening up from their somewhat grey appearance. Now I was going to paint the top of the funnels and a few of the pipes in copper, but after I’d laid down a basecoat in bronze I decided that this was bright enough so left it at that.

Myles then arrived with his three “Plato class light cruisers” that he had been painting at the same time as I had mine, and a cracking job I think he has done on them the striking pale turquoise and white hulls look great and couldn’t be more different and yet complimentory to mine. We decided to give both sets a coat of Quickshade because as Myles said “I Quickshade everything these days!”, before giving them a final coat of matt varnish. As I stated at the start of this weeks posting I’m still not entirely sure how I got into this project, but I am starting to warm to it now.

Till next week, Cheers Roger.