ACW Commission: Confederate Uniforms Basecoated

I wrote in my last post that I hoped to finish basecoating the uniforms in 2-3 days. That was eight days ago, and I just finished basecoating tonight. I try to set aside a good chunk of time to paint each day, but this week was a perfect example of how other things can eat into my painting time.

Whiny stuff deleted

Instead of averaging 1.5-2.0 hours painting each day, I only averaged a half an hour this week. Still, the Confederate infantry is the toughest part of this commission, and I'm still shaping up to finish it within 4-5 weeks.

ACW Commission: CSA rifles, flesh, and socks

It's slow work, but I'm still grinding away on the 160 rebs. I finished the muskets on Thursday, painted all the flesh yesterday, and did both the base color and the drybrushed highlights on socks today. Tonight I'll start on the base coat for the uniforms, which I figure will take two or three days.

The paint job looks a little rough, but it always does at first. Right now I'm just getting the base shades on. The highlighting will make the figures pop.

ACW Commission: CSA Hair and Hats

It doesn't look like much for two days' work, but I've finished the hair, hats, and backpacks and started on the metal bits.

ACW Commission: Confederate Infantry Primed

I've decided to tackle the Confederates first, mostly because they're the hardest to paint. Glenn included 160 Confederate infantry, the largest piece of the commission. If I can complete these 160 figures in four weeks, I figure I'll have a good chance to meet my goal of finishing the entire commission in 3-4 months.

I spent the past two days cutting all imperfections off the figures, washing them in hot water and dish soap to remove the mold release agent, gluing them to tongue depressors, spray priming them with flat black enamel paint, and giving them an all-over layer of thin black acrylic paint to hide any remaining metal. Now, at last, I'm ready to paint.

Tomorrow I'll start on the hair. That's the way these large commissions go. You have to break the work into small enough parts to complete one part each day. So tomorrow I'll spend all day painting hair on 160 men. Sunday I'll drybrush highlights on the hair.

Starting a Huge ACW Commission

Today I received the figures for my largest commission to date. Glenn is planning on playing an American Civil War variant of the Commands and Colors system, and he has opted to play with 28mm figures. I'll be painting both Union and Confederate for the game.

The total figure count for this commission is 420 foot, 46 mounted, 6 riderless horses, and 18 guns. I figure I'll be lucky to finish within three months. Glenn has granted permission for me to post my progress on the blog, so stay tuned to see these armies grow.

FOG Republican Roman Army: Consul

With a day to kill before I start my next commission, I grabbed some figures that I already had primed, and I painted up my commanding general for my Field of Glory Romans.

The figures are 1st Corps' LRR-06 "Pompey." Although the figures are meant for the Roman civil wars of the mid 1st century BC, I can't see anything that keeps me from using them for the Second Punic War.

The Pompey figure makes a convincing looking tribune, with his lictors on his left and his standard on his right. I was very happy with how the 1st Corps figures painted up.

After emphasizing speed above quality on my Carthaginian spearmen, it was a nice change of pace to relax and lavish some attention on these four figures.

64 Man Project, Day 7 DONE!

Today I painted the shield designs, attached the shields to the figures with 30 second cyanoacrylate, highlighted the shield fields, painted the shield rims, and attached all the completed figures to their Field of Glory bases.

Tomorrow I'll finish the bases, but the figures themselves are done! I spent one day prepping and priming the figures and six days painting them. In my last project, I only counted the days spent painting, but this time I counted the hours too.

During the first day, I spent two hours getting the figures ready to paint. Over the next six days, I spent a total of 12 hours actually painting the figures. This works out to five and a third figures per hour, or about 11 minutes per figure. These Libyan spearmen are not as well painted as those for my WAB army, but they'll do.

It's worth emphasizing that there's no way I could sit down and paint one 28mm figure, start to finish, in 11 minutes. The only way I can paint at this rate is through economy of scale.

With these two units of heavy infantry, my FOG Carthaginian army is nearly done. Only three stands of generals remain to complete.