Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Painting 10mm Great War British

In order to help keep me motivated to keep painting, I took a break recently from painting Civil War miniatures to work on something else for a while. That last thing I really need is another project, but I figured working on something different for a while would keep me painting and also make it a refreshing change when I go back to paint more Civil War stuff again.

In a previous post, I wrote a review of Warhammer Historical: The Great War, and I liked the rules. So I bought some 10mm Pendraken Great War miniatures, which I also discussed in a blog post here. I got just enough miniatures to make a few units to eventually try out the rules with. The first up to be painted were some late war British.

I am by no means an expert in the period. Like I said, I'm just painting these as a temporary change of pace from the American Civil War miniatures I've been working on. So the colors may not be perfect, but they seem to look okay to me. They were painted using Games Workshop/Citadel paint.

First I primed them white and painted the uniforms Snakebite Leather.
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I painted all the straps and pouches with Bleached Bone, flesh areas with Bronzed Flesh, boots with Shadow Grey, rifle with Bestial Brown, rifle barrel and bayonet with Mithril Silver. The base can be whatever color you want. I then put a wash of thinned down brown ink over the entire miniature (except for the bayonet, so that it stays shiny).
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The miniatures have something on them that I think is a covered canteen. I've seen it painted blue in other pictures of Great War miniatures, so I painted those blue. I then painted some roughly square shaped red unit markings on the shoulders.
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I then glued the miniatures to thin wooden 25mm circular bases from Litko Aerosystems, which I had spray painted brown. I put three of them to a base because in Warhammer Historical: The Great War, each 28mm miniature represents 3-4 men. I decided instead to use three 10mm miniatures to a base so that I'd be playing in 1:1 scale.
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I then based them with a combination of brown and light tan sand/fine ballast, medium grey ballast, and green flock. I was attempting to get the look of rocky dirt/mud, with just a little bit of grass showing.
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So there you have it. I think this method gave pretty good results, with relatively few steps. Let me know what you think.

5 comments:

  1. I'm following developments on "The Great War" with a lot of interest. I have always had a fascination for WWI, I see it as the pivotal war of the 20th century, even more-so than WWII. I think WWII was the second act of WWI, personally.

    Your minis look great! I'm amazed at what you can do at 10mm. I have a hard enough time at 28!

    This post will definitely go into my keepers should I ever decide to drink the KoolAid and join the GW-army-madness. Please keep posting on your experiences.

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  2. Thank you for the comment! I'm glad you're enjoying the Great War posts. I'm really being won over by the 10mm miniatures. They really aren't difficult to paint. I finished those 36 10mm miniatures much quicker than it would take me to paint up the equivalent 12 28 mm miniatures. And I think once I get a whole army of them on the table, they are going to look fantastic.

    The really nice thing about these miniatures was that everything could be shaded with a single wash of brown ink, so they were pretty quick to paint. The only difficult step is the Bleached Bone step, because some of the straps are very thin and it takes a bit of patience to paint them.

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  3. I'm assuming you still use 28mm rules for distances/etc with the bases - how will that affect buildings and such? Will you use 10mm buildings or 28mm? Same for vehicles?

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  4. I haven't played a game of Great War yet, and probably won't for a long time. But I intend to use the rules exactly as they are written. In the rules, each 28mm figure is meant to represent 3-4 men, so I think it should work out just fine to use the same rules but with 3 10mm figures on each base. If building and vehicles are all in 10mm as well, it should only work out even better, since everything, figures, buildings and ground, will be to the same scale.

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  5. If building and vehicles are all in 10mm as well, it should only work out even better, since everything, figures, buildings and ground, will be to the same scale.

    Would that mean that distances, as calculated for 28mm figures, buildings and ground, would "work" with 10mm scale vehicles and buildings? Or am I putting too much into the 10mm vs. 28mm? I'm pretty new to miniature gaming, I apologize if these questions are naive.

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