Sunday painting 28mm Napoleonics

 A few days ago I had the thought that, for me, 6mm would be my go-to scale when I want to get an army on the table and 28mm (or what I often refer to as 30mm now because I can't figure out the whether 28mm or 32mm are what we're playing with and that every manufacture seems to measure things differently) will be the scale for taking my time.

But after pulling out some unfinished 30mm Black Powder Waterloo minis (they came in a Waterloo starter box set with the rules), I'm finding that I'm instinctively trying to take shortcuts. 

My normal method of painting would be base colour, wash, base colour, highlight, but this time I wanted to try dark base colour and a couple layers of watered down highlights. I've used this method a couple of times successfully and watering the paint down a lot means the highlights blend in with the layer underneath. But sometimes you have to do a couple of coats of each layer as the changes can be very subtly.

And they were. So subtle in fact, that even though I use magnifying glasses for 30mm figures, I still couldn't distinguish the parts I had just done. Frustrated by the fact that I had based most of the figures 2x2, I sometimes struggled to recognise which figures I had and hadn't done.

So I thought I'd just skip ahead to a lighter layer and see how that turned out. Shown here are the pants done in this method, and you can sort of see the bedrolls done that way too. Everything else on these models is my original paintjob from when I bought the box--ie; skin, coat, facings, and cuffs + washes.

I'm not terribly happy with how they're coming out, but I've also realised I'm just too impatient.

The thing that motivated me to get back to these figures is that I was given the free sprue that was included in a recent Wargames Illustrated magazine (#432 Dec 2023). The one I received in my copy was the French sprue, and a friend got the English sprue with his.

For bonus points I managed to get myself to the local wargames club (Wellington Warlords) yesterday and one of the guys there said I can have his sprue too, as he doesn't play Napoleonics.

So far they look like this:

Interestingly, the red coat looks like it's had a wash, but that's just slightly watered down AK Wine Red as a base coat and I'm planning on highlighting with a watered down AK Blood Red. The trousers are AK Neutral Grey, and I'll highlight them as above, which is a mix of AK's Neutral and Ash Greys.

This is what I'm working through:

There are also a Hanoverian attachment and the French Force consisting of a unit of infantry and one of cavalry. Maybe I'll clear some desk space tomorrow to make room for working on multiple units at a time.

Hopefully tomorrow the rest of the bases for my 6mm forces will arrive, so I'll start basing the rest of those. I've also undercoated a couple of 6mm bases each of limbered and deployed cannon which I'll get to work on.