August Painting Totals

I had a very productive August, moving my last commission toward completion and finishing a lot of figures for myself as well. Here's what I painted.

15mm Macedonians (commission): 14 infantrymen, 25 cavalrymen

28mm ACW Union, 5 mounted generals

28mm ACW Confederates: 62 infantrymen

28mm Macedonians, 24 infantrymen

28mm Gauls, 3 infantrymen

28mm AWI Continentals, 20 infantrymen

In 15mm I finished 14 foot and 25 horse, all painted to a very high standard. In 28mm I finished 111 infantrymen and 5 mounted generals, and you've seen all but the Gauls on this blog. That makes for 595 SPPs in August and an annual total of 2842. I've painted the following figures so far this year:

28mm Foot: 300

28mm Mounted: 58

15mm Foot: 534

15mm Mounted: 105

15mm Elephants: 6

15mm Guns: 2

Old Glory Second Edition AWI Americans (2)

In my last post, I showed the first stick of painted Americans, and I commented on the oddness of the faces. I'm happy to report that the rest of the faces are, at least marginally, better.

But as you can see, they're still not really good faces. For $.60 each, they're pretty good figures. But they're far short of the Perry figures I have my eye on.

So how would a regiment of these figures look on the table? I'm not going to base them yet, as I plan to mix these men in hunting shirts into units with men in coats, but here are the 20 figures arrayed as a regiment.

I'd say they look the part. I'm building the American army at Freeman's Farm, which is a medium sized battle. I'll probably still use Perry for that army, but I'll certainly use some Old Glory figures to add onto that force for larger fights. They do look good all ranked up, and by mixing their four codes, I'll be able to produce suitably ragged looking units.

Old Glory Second Edition AWI Americans

I picked these figures up a few months ago, thinking that I might give the American Revolution a try in 28mm. I love the period, which has everything a wargamer could possibly want, and I love the scale, but the only figure range that really called to me was Perry. Before I gave the Perrys $400 for a medium sized American army, I thought I would give the Old Glory second edition figures a try.

These are from AWI-59 "Line Hunting Shirts - Cocked Hats." I primed the figures yesterday morning, put a base coat on them last night, and did the detail work this morning.

My first reaction on seeing the bare lead, and the reason that the figures sat unpainted for so long, was that the faces were strangely long. I thought they might look better with paint, but there they are, with their long, thin noses and narrow skulls even more prominent now that they're painted.

Apart from the faces, these figures are excellent. The fringed hunting shirt takes a drybrush very well, and the waistcoat and breeches have just enough raised detail to make painting them a breeze. The body proportions are very good, and the poses should work very well once the figures are ranked up.

So could I paint an army of them? I don't know. I'll see how they look once based in their units, but for now I'm leaning toward the Perry figures.

28mm Confederate Infantry Command Stands

While I continue to plug away on a couple of commissions, I took some time this morning to base my Confederare army's 10 infantry command stands. The figures are all Sash and Saber, and the flags are all GMB.

Highlighting 28mm Figures

I've received a dozen emails over the past six months asking me about highlighting figures. Most have asked if I'm not overdoing my figures by adding that second shade.

While it's certainly possible to create a good looking 28mm army just by simple block painting, using a highlight shade can really make your figures pop on the table. Here are some ACW Confederates I finished highlighting today. These are part of a batch of 40 figures. Block painting all 40 took me about 20 hours. Highlighting took only another three hours.

Obviously, these are before and after pictures. The block painted figures aren't bad looking, but by investing just a little more time, I can really give the figures some depth and a lot more visual appeal.

Foundry Rank and File Macedonians

Last week I picked up an entire Foundry collection on eBay, getting the figures for $1 apiece. The collection was "Macedonian Army," and it contained a variety of different phalangite poses. These are all imperial sculpts, and they have the outlandish plumes and extra armor that I associate with the wars of the successors, but I'll definitely use them in my Alexandrian army. Two of the packs -- "eastern pikemen" and "Greek mercenaries" are unlikely to find a home in my early Macedonian army, but the rest should work very well.

One nice thing about buying these on eBay was that the older packs contained 12 figures each, instead of the 8 in the current packs. The figures all had their shields cast onto their bodies, which definitely made it harder to paint the recesses behind the shield. But it did save a few steps in priming, painting, and attaching the shields.

I wanted to see how quickly I could produce well painted Macedonians, so I actually timed myself while painting these 24 figures. I thought I could crank out passable paint jobs for the whole lot in just two hours, then throw them up on eBay at about $5 a figure. If I could do that, I thought I might paint these for sale, but I fell far short of that goal. I spent an hour prepping these figures, six hours painting them, and another hour basing them. 24 figures in eight hours makes for three figures an hour, which is a respectable pace, but not really fast enough to justify selling them.

In order to get these figures done as quickly as possible, I gave up painting three tone flesh and tunic and settled for two tones. I primed the figures brown rather than black, saving myself a step in applying a brown basecoat for helmets, pikes, sword scabbards, straps, sandals, greaves, and shields. I declined to paint any designs on the linothorax armor, settling for a two tone off-white scheme.

I'll be starting in on some figures for a commission now, and I still have some ACW Confederate command on my workbench, but once those two sets are done, I'll be returning to my Macedonian army. I hope to have the whole thing done in time for a modeling competition in October.