Painting a whoooooole load of British Riflemen

On the WS&S Podcast (episode 28), I was challenged to see how quickly I could paint some historical miniatures using the new Citadel Contrast Paints, which is basically painting with prepared washes. Warlord Games kindly provided two boxes of their new plastic Napoleonic British Riflemen. One set would be painted by me and a second set by my friend Rossco using traditional painting methods.

This experiment was reminiscent of my previous blogs on painting a whoooooole box of French line infantry. In fact, I must try that again with this ink shade method, cue future blog entry!

The minis were started by spraying the models white. I used standard undercoat, nothing 'fancy'. The special undercoat from GW might give better results, but a standard undercoat worked fine for me. I then added a coat of Dark Angel Green Contrast for the jackets and some of the trousers, with a touch of Contrast Medium to water it down slightly, as I was concerned it would be too dark. In hindsight, I should have used the undiluted colour.

I then added Basilicarum Grey Contrast to the trousers I hadn't painted green, and then added in Black Templar Contrast for the boots, collars, shako and powder box.

Next came the satchel, rifle straps and powder horn, done in Skeleton Horde Contrast, and the face and hands, for which I used Gulliman Flesh Contrast. The water container was a mixture of Aethermatic Blue and Ultramarine Blue Contrast.

For the finishing touches, I added diluted Wildwood Contrast for the rifle, followed by a chainmail colour for the metalwork. Brass was used on the badge, the buttons and some of the metalwork. I finished the bases with Vallejo Flat Earth. Throughout the process, I made a few mistakes where one colour leaked into another area, but the Citadel Contrasts are very controllable. I simply patched the area with white and added the original colour.

Left is a pro painted model and right is the Citadel.

All in all, I produced ten reasonably well painted Riflemen in five hours (including breaks), the same time it took my friend to produce one model. I reckon I could probably knock my production time down to 20-25 minutes a model and improve the quality. Importantly, these are troops on the table! Contrast paints do take some skill to use well, but practice makes perfect!