"Help me improve my Winter War Finns" Topic

I've just started painting my Winter War Finns, and I'm trying to work out a good paint scheme/process to get decent results reasonably quickly. Have a look and see if you can help me make any improvements to my process: link

I recommend visiting the military museum in the Reserve Officers' School ("Reserviupseerikoulu", abbreviated RUK for Reservi Upseeri Koulu) in Hamina, on the south coast of Finland. The museum in small, but has many uniforms from the period on display, as well as large models of fighting positions used by the Finns.

Finland has several other military museums that are probably also worth visiting.

I think the Finns look great. Maybe a brown wash around the trouser bottoms for mud & a tan drybrush on the breadbags. The breadbags just seem to bright.

Personally I would make the snow base titanium white and the snow clothing some other white.

If you look at these photos of white cars in snow

you can see that snow is pure white where the car, even when clean, is noticeably off-white.

I like them though – good faces. I wonder if it is worth experimenting with colours other than grey for the shading? The modeller Shep Paine used to paint white uniforms either pale green or pale mauve then drybrush white over them to get either a warmer or colder shade. I've tried green on Austrian Napoleonics and it looks pretty good. I did it on a 54mm figure and was quite pleased:

Try dipping them in grey Minwax furniture stain.

I think they look fine. The biggest area is going to be the snow suits, so if you really want to improve, focus on that. Add in more depth to the white by basing dark grey, highlighting light grey, highlighting that very light grey and then finishing with a white highlight (leaving edges of the earlier highlight visible at each stage). Use a blue-grey to have more chromatic depth (I see you are using GW colours… I'm not familiar with the new stuff in your list, but they used to make a Elf Grey or Shadow Grey that worked well as a blue-grey). The best policy is always to use one colour and then progressively lighten it with white.

In general, I'd avoid black wash entirely, except perhaps for washing over metal.

miracle stuff for snow bases :

precisioniceandsnow.com

I'm going to put them on clear acrylic bases.

I did try to do more of a blue-white, but I wasn't happy with how that turned out. But maybe I just didn't do it well. With practice hopefully I'll get better at how much grey I leave versus how much pure white I put on the highlights, but leaving too much grey makes them look grey. So it's hard to find that balance.

The blue-white look is very hard to make look good on miniatures, I think.

Blue oil paint wash works a treat. Shaded areas on white are blue tinted not black tinted. Look at snow pics.
L