“A Real Blast from the Past” (Paint What You Got Challenge):

Now the title of Dave’s Challenge is “Paint what you got”, now I take this to be an opportunity to try and clear some of the backlog of figures we all have (come on you know you have! 😉), so I thought I’d resurrect an old feature from this blog the “Roll of the die”. This is something I haven’t done for a few years now to be honest, what basically happens is I first flip a coin that will then take me to one of two lists of figures that I’ve had for far too long, these are divided up into thirty boxes on each sheet, I then roll a D30, and then paint the figures that are listed in that box, clear? (As mud!). Anyway, I flipped the coin and got tails, this equated to “Galahads” list (oh yes I gave them silly names to add to the fun? 😳), then rolled the die and got…5, which gave me.

Box 5: 20mm WW2 Japanese troops (6 of choice)

So when was the last time I painted any of these then? OK I don’t expect an answer as to be fair the only person reading this who has even the slightest chance of a  recollection of them is Simon (as he was my only follower at the time 😁), it was in fact January 2015! Now these inscrutable chaps are from “Over the wire’s”, “Merrills Marauders” game that I bought many, many years ago. Now usually with stuff like this I’ll “bite the bullet” and batch paint the lot in one go, but it is a testament to just how poor these figures are that I simply couldn’t face painting up these Japanese troops that way. But I thought, “Hey, I’ve had an eight year break since the last lot”, so six figures were duly picked out to be based on 20mm cardboard squares (how all my WW2 collection is based), the bases were blended in using filler and then they were given a “blow over” coat of matt black, before the painting could really begin in earnest.

Following the instructions of the last blog post to feature them (part of the reason I started this blog in the first place, was to have this record of how I painted stuff) I began by painting all of the uniform parts of the figures with khaki and then heavily dry-brushing these again with a mix of khaki and coffee, once this was done and dry the strapping’s around their lower legs was painted with coffee. Next I added the straps and packs, along with the stocks of their rifles in chocolate brown and then leather items were then highlighted with leather brown and the wooden stocks in Eurasian flesh, then on the figures wearing a shoulder satchels I added these in deep bronze green. Now according to the last post I highlighted these in “grass green”, but it appears I no longer have this colour (eight years after all 🙄), so instead I mixed some vert green with a little stone green as got something reasonably similar (a little variation in manufacturing seems quite plausible 🤔). Their boots and metallic gun parts came next, done in matt black with chain-mail over the metallic bits. Flesh next, and thankfully I still had the old “horizon paints” colour “flesh tone 7” this is quite a brownish flesh and works well as a base coat, I then highlighted this with European flesh after I’d added the eyes in black (I don’t tend to bother with the whites on 20mmfigures). Lastly one figure had a blanket rolled up at the top of his pack and as I did last time I painted it blue grey.

They were then given a coat of Strongtone “Quickshade and once dry the bases were painted to match the rest of my 20mm WW2 figures (well as well as I could), therefore I simply coated the entire bases with earth brown and dry-brushed this with scenic green before adding some summer mix hairy grass, once again I no long have the green shade hairy flock I used on the last lot (as I said EIGHT years!!). They were finally given a coat of matt varnish, before going up to the loft and joining the rest of my comrades. These didn’t actually seem that bad to paint (not fun either but…), so I might have to return to this lot again later in the year and finally get the rest done! (Of course I might just forget about them again for another eight years too, who knows! 😉)

So till next time, cheers Roger.

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