It was a pain but a start......

I was able to experiment on the first batch of Civil War figures. I have seen some of the newer Pendraken American Civil War figures online and bought a pack or two in the past but this was really a first impression of the range. These figures are really nice and once primed the details really come out. Overall the quality I have learned to expect and appreciate from Pendraken. Here is a picture of the poses from the two Confederate marching packs. As you can see a good variety of poses and good detail on the figures.

I started with the marching figures by putting them on sticks. Now my usual mode of painting 10mm is to try and do batches at a time. I like to keep it to 20-50 figures at a time so I can keep focus and eventually have a finished product. I paint the batches by color blocks. With these guys I immediately ran into the problem that I wanted them to look like confederates, that is less uniform that say 1866 Austrians. I also wanted to experiment with all the grey and brown shades I purchased. Looking back a smart move would have been to develop some kind of system like grey pants every third figure or brown tunic every second. But instead I just kind of went about it randomly. Long story short it took me forever to get a batch done. Added to this the details are great but encourage me to paint them and even more time consuming to fix them when I screwed them up. Every once in a while I stood back and looked at the figures from a distance in order to convince myself that I was not destroying these fantastic figures with my terrible painting skills. Nonetheless after more time than I would like to admit I finished a first batch. All that's left is the Army Painter wash. I hope this will bring out some of the details and somewhat hide the mess I made on these. So next batch should be up soon and this time I am going to create some kind of system.

  

What is Butternut anyway?

In getting myself moving on the Civil War project it would have made sense for me to start with the Union. The uniforms are much more uniform than the confederates and in 10mm I could probably get some troops done rather fast. Nonetheless I decided to start with the confederates. So I bought the following from Pendraken:

Growing up I always thought confederates more or less wore grey. Yet researching online shows that it is actually is much more complicated. Grey, brown, blue, green and something called butternut!!!

I was thoroughly confused and decided to settle on what I thought looked like my conception of confederates and would translate to 10mm. I went with the following pictures as inspiration:

Also purchased these paints to add to my colors. These are recommended as standard for ACW. So wish me the best. 

Within the next few days I will get started on the figures. Wish me luck!!!

Summer Project Prep?

My father was a Civil War and American Revolutionary War buff and as a result good portion of our family vacations were spent driving down south to visit American Civil War and Revolutionary War battlefields. My brother used to joke about how we were going on vacation again to look at more tipped canons. Obviously I developed some of my interest in military history from these excursions as well as perusing my fathers book collection. Strangely however, when I started painting miniature toys I never gravitated towards either of these two conflicts. It may have been some over saturation because I always found the wars in Europe to be more exciting.

While I still gear towards the European conflicts some recent YouTube videos and Wargame AAR's have ignited an interest in the American Civil War and Revolutionary War. This video is especially inspiring https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzsqyGNC6gk I was thinking either would be a good project to start this summer and that perhaps by charting my progress on the blog I could actually stick to it and have something done by September. I decided to start with the Civil War. When it came to scale I was split as usual and considered 6mm, 10mm and 15mm. I ended up deciding I would go with Pendraken 10mm because a lot of my stuff is Pendraken, I have some 10mm terrain that could work and I generally really like the look of the Pendraken Civil War range. To get started I decided the first distinct thing about Civil War battlefields is fences and lots of trees. So I got started on these first. I purchased and painted some very nice fences from the Baggage Train and put together some tree bases with trees purchased on ebay. So its a start. Next few days I hope to get started on the figures. So the start:

More 20mm WW2

I keep plugging along with the 20mm WW2 stuff. I am chiefly interested in early war and the lesser known fronts. These are some Slovaks from Axel miniatures and Soviets from SHQ. As far as I know SHQ is the only company in either 20mm or 15mm to make Soviets in the correct early helmets. I think they are accurate for fighting the Japanese in the 1930's and Poland 1939.