"Painting 10mm ACW Confederate Infantry" Topic

I have a post on my blog today that contains pictures of my very first painted 10mm confederates, the 1st Texas Infantry Regiment, as well as a painting tutorial explaining how I painted them. Hopefully this will be helpful to other people looking to start painting small scale Confederate American Civil War miniatures.

The figures are all from GHQ, and I used GW/Citadel paints.

link

How long did it take you to paint all those figures? The results look good. 36 figures in all right?

John

agreed, very impressive looking en mass,

regards

jim

Very nice indeed! I agree that they look very good en masse (mass?).

I have been painting GHQ confederates as well. I can usually do 24 in an evening.

IMO, the GHQ are fairly easy to paint except for the straps. The figures are fairly slim compared to Old Glory and Pendraken 10mm with less exaggerated straps and other features in general. Less exaggeration makes them a bit more difficult to paint-in particular the straps. I paint the base uniform color in the hard to reach parts between straps first, then straps and finally the rest of the uniform around the straps.

Definitely very nice looking figures when done. Mr Squirrels figures are a good example of how nice they can look.

Thank you for the compliments, everyone.

I'm not sure how long it took to paint them, since I didn't keep track. Also, since this was my first unit of confederates, I spent some time experimenting with a few of them using different techniques to find one that had good results. I'm working on a second regiment now, so I'll try to pay attention to how much time it takes. For the bulk of them, I'm thinking maybe about a week, and I paint maybe around an hour a day. I spent a little extra time on the command figures doing highlights and painting trim and such.

The only really difficult parts for the standard figures are the last few steps before the inking. Painting the gun barrels, belts and straps. As Jagger2008 says, they are very thin since the figures are more correctly proportioned than others. It would probably be easier to paint the metal on the rifle barrels first, then paint the brown on the rest of the rifle, than the way I did it. But painting the straps and belts takes time and patience and a small brush.

There are 40 figures total in the regiment. 36 advancing, two flags, one drummer, and one officer. Most of my regiments will probably have 39, and omit the state flag. It works out well, because it means that every three packs of GHQ infantry gives me two regiments, with some left over command figures.

There are 40 figures total in the regiment. 36 advancing, two flags, one drummer, and one officer. Most of my regiments will probably have 39, and omit the state flag. It works out well, because it means that every three packs of GHQ infantry gives me two regiments, with some left over command figures.

An alternative is to buy an extra command group bag. Each regular infantry bag contains 24 infantry and 3 command figures. So by buying the extra command bag, I ended up with 2 15 man regiments, each containing 12 infantry and 3 command group figures, by adding extra commander groups from the commander bag.

A couple of notes:

Last I heard GW Bronzed Flesh will be discontinued. Too bad b/c it was a nice color.

If you're finding Snakebite Leather a little too dark, try GW Dessert Yellow. It might work well with a wash.

Desert Yellow, not yellow for dessert.

Thanks for the info, Bottom Dollar. It is too bad they are discontinuing Bronzed Flesh. It's a very useful color. But using it on 10mm miniatures with very little exposed flesh, I think my nearly full pot will last quite a while.

I thought the Snakebite Leather on the pants turned out pretty good, actually. It is the grey jackets that I think are a bit too dark. I will make them lighter next time, but then I don't know what color to highlight with before I ink. Maybe white.

I also think in the future I should have a greater variety in the colors of the pants instead of doing most of them in Snakebite Leather.

Mr. Squirrel, When you ink your miniatures how much do you dilute the ink? I tried it a couple of times straight out of the vial and it looked terrible. And am I correct in thinking that dry brushing is putting some paint on the bristles and then brushing some of the paint out until it is just about dry but still has enough pigment to apply a fine coat?

The toughest part about painting Reb, IMO, is figuring out what to paint the slouch hats. No matter how great the rest of the figure may look, the slouch hats stand out so much they take control of the whole paint job.

Bottom Dollar, I never use the ink undiluted. I don't know the specific ratios I use, but it's definitely several parts water to one part ink. I just dip a large brush in water and brush it off into the pot lid several times, then dip the brush in the ink just once and mix this in. So it is very diluted.

I also mis in just a little bit of dishwashing detergent. Less than a drop. So drop a little on something else, then get just a little on the tip of a brush and mix that in. What that does is make the ink settle better in the recesses instead of globbing up on the raised areas. But if you use too much, the ink will mostly run off and not settle anywhere.

Yes, the hats are a big part of it. I'm not really happy with how the hats turned out when I inked them. The ones I didn't ink but manually hightlighted I think look better, but the highlight needs to be pretty dramatic to show up at a distance.

Mr. Squireel, I can now see there's a difference between the word "inking" and the process of inking. Thanks for going into it in detail ! If I have the chance, I may give it another try sometime this summer.

And yes, those slouch hats are tough. I bought some GW/Citadel foundation colors which have a few more variations in browns, yellows and oranges than the standard line stuff. Technically, I think they're meant for priming or base-coating, but I used some of them for final coat variations in slouch hats, pants, etc…

PS I use GW Terracota on my rifles. Unfortunately, that's another color that has been discontinued.

Very nice looking figures! From personal experience, I can say that Scorched Brown works well for the rifles, though it's darker than Terracota.

It's surprising, and good, to see that other people use GW's paints like I do!

The GW range is pretty good, though they're officially dropping some of my favorite colors. (I even called their U.S. office to confirm that a couple of months ago). They're readily available for replenishment in just about every hobby shop, though I do supplement from other paint lines.

When I say I "ink" the miniatures, it's more like given them a wash with very diluted ink, with the goal of having it settle mostly in the recesses to do some shading.

Do you think it would be helpful if I did a blog post that just explained some of the various painting techniques I use? I guess I've picked up some lingo and jargon from other people who I have learned painting techniques from, and maybe it would help to clarify what I mean when I use some of those terms.

You might experiment with using a fine point permanent marker, or technical pen for straps. I have had good effects using gel pens for markings on various vehicles.

Respects,