First grenadiers
At last I managed to get a few hours to paint up my first figures for my Project Platoon Panzergrenadiers. After 10 minutes with a craft knife on a chopping mat cleaning up odd bits of flash they were stuck to 20mm x 20mm square bases made from GW movement trays and undercoated black by hand. Normally I spray them with a matt black spray, but for such a small number of figures it did not seem economical, so I went for the cheaper but slightly longer option.
The figures shown here are the cheap Artizan miniatures brought from a bring and buy a few years back. I think the front figure is meant to be for the DAK, but the zeltbahn being worn over the head like that screams 1944 Western Front to me, so fits in nicely. The rear figures are an MG42 team. I painted them all up using Anita’s craft acrylics and mixing the colours with the only exceptions being the flesh and the silver which both came from Coat D’Arms, and a few ink washes from GW. Each figure took about 45 minutes to complete the paint job. Overall I’m pretty pleased with them.
The splinter pattern is about as reasonable as I can make it without spending hours on each one. Essentially it is a mixture of 50:50 light green and grey for the basecoat. The brown jagged splinters are painted first as a series of triangles. Then about half the number of green splinters are added touching the brown splinters. Lastly with a very fine brush I attempted to add some of the thin tear drops. The camouflage pattern was all given an additional Devlan Mud GW ink wash and a few sections were highlighted again. The fieldgrey was a mix of 50:50 mid grey and dark green. I kept the black undercoat in the recesses for a darker shade. After another wash of Devlan Mud I gave a final mid grey highlight on the raised areas. Nothing beats having a few examples to look at when you paint up camouflage, so I had Mollo’s classic Army Uniforms of WW2 and the obligatory Osprey with some nice colour plates by Stephen Andrew on hand for guidance.
The basing is sharp sand painted earth brown and drybrushed in a light grey followed by a sandy cream colour. To finish it off there is a bit of Silfor prairie tuft on each one. I brought the big economy packs of these from Mutineer Miniatures a while back and they might initially be quite expensive but look great and will last for several armies. I am right out of static grass at the moment, but I will probably add some to break up the base a bit more. Time wise this was pretty quick but had to be done in stages so that the sand stuck properly and the colours did not mix when drybrushed.
In the background you can see some of the trenches I made for the Brecourt Manor participation game we ran at The Other Partizan. More on how to make those later!
Happy painting and gaming!
Cheers
Mark
