“A roll of the die” (week 27)

Well it’s Salute time again, and as you read this I should be on by merry way down to London on the train for a good old “spend up”, and more importantly “meet up” with some of my fellow bloggers (unless your reading this later in which case I’ve been and come back), but hopefully I’ll go into this more next weekend (if not sooner). But for the meantime I need to tell you what I’ve been up to this week. I decided that as I didn’t want to start anything that was going to stop me painting up some of the new stuff I hope to be buying “down south”, so I went back to the old faithful of my “Random Painting Generator”, so out can the coins of destiny and the toss brought up a head and a tail so this meant that it was Merlins list that came out for another round of “Very British Civil War” figures. The following roll of the old D20 gave me a four and that equated too…

Box 4– (5x 28mm civilian rifle men)

So after looking through the rifle toting “civi’s” by Irregular Miniatures that I had, I picked out the five you see to your right. Now the first problem I had was that these figures are technically not VBCW figures at all but are really either ACW (chaps with their guns pointing up) or Modern Insurgents (chaps with their guns pointing down). Now this wouldn’t be a problem as Ian at Irregular has sculpted flat caps onto them except that the ACW chap has a cartridge bag across his shoulder (I can live with this), and the Insurgent is bare chested and has no shoes (The shoes I can paint on , the shirt though is a bit more of a pain), I decided to speed up this week’s painting I’d paint on T shirt style white vests onto the bare chests, though next time I paint any of these I might see if there is something else I can try (sculpting on shirts of covering their chests with scarves springs to mind). Anyway back to this lot, and after they were glued to card spacers and then to tuppences, they had their bases blended in wit filler before they were spayed matt black, and away I went with the painting proper.

Their weapons were the dry-brushed with chainmail, then I painted an undercoat of either, chocolate brown and black or dark grey and black and a couple of them had stripes added to their trousers/jacket in either light grey or butternut. Then the gaps between the stripes, or the rest of their suits and hats were highlighted in either chocolate brown or dark grey. A couple of the hats then had checks added butternut or light grey again. Next I painted in the shirts in either coffee and cream or porcelain blue and light blue, then I added the scarves to three of the figures in royal blue, bright red and stone green respectively, to add a little colour. Flesh next this was undercoated in continental flesh and then after the eyes were added this was highlighted in a mix of the same and pale flesh. The stocks of their rifles and the shoulder bags were then painted chocolate brown, the rifles highlighted with butternut and the bags in leather brown. That just left the hair on the figures to be added, now as I have a few more of these chaps to do I decided to limit their hair colour to either “ginger” this was done in chestnut brown highlighted with orange, or “Blonde” this was my two shades of sand (colour party and miniature paints), and they were ready to be quickshaded and based in my usual manner.

And that is where I’m up to now, they are basically finished and just need to be sprayed with a little matt varnish (no I haven’t turned to the dark side of “glossy” fig’s Simon), but as it stands I might leave them now till I’m ready to varnish next week’s figures, then replace these photos.

So unless I see you at Salute, till next week, cheers Roger.