"Reworking old Heinrichsen Flats - French Infantry" Topic

I recently bought a few sets of Heinrichsen flats on UK eBay. These are quite old, Heinrichsen was a big producer in the early 1900's. When I got the figures, I thought, "Oh, no. Think I made a mistake here".

Not only are they undersized relative to modern 30mm flats, they looked terrible. It was pretty hard to see if what was under the crude factory paint was any good, so I stripped a few. What do you know, not so bad !

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And as reworked, painted with acrylics:

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Steve

Most impressive!

Great job!

Very well done!

It would be great if you cold do a Workshop article on your methods. You have done an excellent job

Wow! Really beautiful! I'd love to see your techniques.

Fantastic brush work Steve. You really bring those figures to life. The results are amazing.

Thanks everyone for the kind words.

I'm not sure what I do is worthy of a workshop article. The paint stripping is simple, I soak the factory paint in Jasco. The engraving of these particular figures is good but simple: certain details are left up to the painter, sort of like Spencer Smith in that respect. I painted on things like the powder flask on the white-coated guy, pockets, buttons, etc.

The original swallow-tail flag wasn't right so I replaced the pole with brass wire, the new flag is wine bottle foil. I kind of messed it up, seemed too stiff-looking as originally done and I cut some waviness into the edges, now it's too small. But still an improvement, I think. ;-)

As for the painting, flats are all about doing enough highlighting and shading to give the figure the illusion of volume. Think of an imaginary sun shining down on the figure from a certain angle and then where would the shadows fall ?

Steve

It is a real art to paint flats to give them a true three dimensional look. You have captured that look with great skill. Thanks for sharing

Steve,

Reminds me of an article I read when I was a kid. It was called "Taking A Lemon And Making Lemonade" and it outlined how the author took a 54mm Fallschirmjaeger figure and turned a crude miniature into a masterpiece. Great work, thank goodness for wine bottle foil. I still have a small stash of old tooth paste and shampoo foil tubes.

Joe

Superb. Absolutely superb.

Very, very nice. I picked up a few flats back in the 70s but could never come anywhere near your standard. Most impressed.

Andy

Thanks again, guys.

Steve