"6mm Dacians and other nasty barbarians" Topic

I just received a boatload, 400-500, of used Baccus Dacians & Samartians from Col. Bill's today and expect the Baccus Dacian Hail Caesar package from here to ship sometime after SALUTE. Looking at what arrived today, my first question is: how do I paint these guys????

I mean, sure there are painting guides out there and I found a couple very helpful for my Romans… but they all address speed painting armies with some sort of uniformity.

So I'm curious, how do folks go about speed painting armies who are not only very colorful, but also so differently dressed as to having absolutely no uniformity at all? Where every shield is individually different?

The Samartians will be easy, I think. I'll try undercoating with Army Painter plate mail, paint faces, horses' tails, etc, and wash with an ink. But the Dacians seem to be another matter and I imagine it's the same problem for Celts and Germans, too.

In any case, especially after the HC package arrives, it looks as if my Romans will be extremely outnumbered… as it should be.

Thanks for any advice and techniques in advance,

Richard in Saxony

Say, for example, you have ten different colours of paint that are suitable for tunics and trousers. Take your first colour and paint the tunic of every tenth figure. Then do the same with the second colour, and so on.

You then do the same thing with the trousers, but make the figure selection at random. This should minimise the numbers of figures with the same colour combination, brown tunic and blue trousers for example.

If you do the same thing with shields you should end up with a very non-uniform looking army. The other thing about shields is that you can use additional colours that wouldn't look right for clothing.

I do much the same as Cerdic for my barbarians. I also glue the unpainted miniatures to Popsicle/craft sticks. I make sure the vary the poses on each stick. So stick one gets brown pants, sticke two; grey etc. Then go back and figure one on each stick gets a red shirt, figure two green.

Thank you both very much, I will give those techniques a go, it doesn't seem so daunting spelled out like that.