PAINTING

Simple but effective painting

       Once your figures are undercoated, you are ready to begin putting down colour. We all find our own routines for this, but I prefer to start off with the main jacket colour using a thin wash of either liquid (transparent) acrylic or ordinary acrylic thinned down to a washing consistencey and with a touch of varnish added to help stabilize the colour. Don't be too precious about neatness here. Acrylics are very forgiving and overpaint very well.

      After the jacket, I usually block in the trouser colour, musket, pack, blanket roll, boots/gaiters and shako/helmet main colour.

       Allow the figures to dry well between each stage or force dry them in yoor hairdryer box. NB. alkydes and oils force dried tend to take on a high gloss finish that is quite difficuly to paint on top of. Alkyds in particular, treated this way, give a wonderful finish to large scale horses or those of generals.

       The next stage after the shako, is to paint in the face and hands before going over belts, facings etc. with white. At this point add the musket straps and those on the pack. Next add the facing colours any epaulettes and musket barrels, bayonets or swords.

       You can probably see here that rather than working from the inside outwards, I tend to paint from the largest areas of colour to the smallest.

        By this stage, the figure is just about there. You can now add any shako plates, buckles and musket bands but NOT chin straps.

        Make sure the figures are properly dry then either use a sepia coloured wash or a very thinned down brown paint stabilised with varnish and gently go over the face and hands, allowing the paint to slide off the high points and collect in hollows, You can treat other areas such as jackets in the same way, either giving the whole figure a wash of the sepia or using a deeper shade of the coat colour (or wherever).

          Allow to dry again, dry brush the face and hands very lightly with the base flesh colour, add hair colour/moustache if any, then add chinscales. Finally paint in the figures base.

Marshall Michel Ney "Bravest of the Brave."

       You can see on the picture of Michel Ney where the coloured washes have been allowed to pool and been over-painted. After these washes are dry, I emphasised the changes in colour by ink lining round details such as cuffs, lacings and facings. These are what the various drawing pens are for. It's far easier to do this with a pen than a brush as the line is constant in thickness and depth of colour. Detail as far down as individual buttons can be brought out or even drawn in using this method. The pen should be used angled into the detail and should be of a size that doesn't make the shadow too wide.

PREPARATION

Preparation for painting.

     I wouldn't say I'm the world's greatest painter, but I can achieve a really good finish on 15-18mm figures - the size of all my Napoleonic  miniatures in a pretty quick time without having to resort to any fancy techniques or novel paint types. What I think I AM good at is mixing colours and working in a way that turns out good results without needing to be an expert. We all develop our own style and methods and this is mine for good gaming quality small scale figures.

Remember, it's important to have a good surface for painting on.
The first thing to do is get rid of any runners and flash. I use side cutters for the runners, a craft knife to pare down flash and either a file or Dremel to flatten off bases. If the figures have flags moulded on, I carefully remove these, drill a small hole in the standard bearers hand and replace the flag staff with wire. dress makers' pins are quite good for the job and don't bend. I have also "acquired" some of the head pins my wife uses in jewellery making, but don't tell her!

Once you've done this, give the figures a wash in soapy water, rinse well and dry. I've found the best way to do this is to put them in a shoe  box with a hole in it to take a hair dryer nozzle. This is also useful if you paint with enamels, or alkyd paints (synthetic oils.)or are just keen to press on. It doesn't work on proper oil paints.

          When painting cavalry, decide whether you want to paint them as one piece, in which case the riders will be glued onto their horses before undercoating.

 Painting in one or two pieces both have their advantages and drawbacks. One piece gives better adhesion, stopping the rider falling off, whilst painting separately makes it slightly easier to paint the horse and saddlery.

          I don't like to see all the horses in a cavalry regiment all exactly the same colour, so if the figures are in different poses, I like to paint the riders separately to give as much variation as possible.

          If, like me you are a bit of a devil for not using proprietary paint colours and you are going to be painting a large number of figures, mix up a batch of paint to the consistency you want in a large enough quantity for them all. I keep empty paint pots and clean them out ready for this. There's nothing worse than getting part way through a regiment and finding you can't quite match up a colour again!

Undercoating

         When the figures are dry, you are ready to start undercoating your figures. Over the years, I've tried all sorts of ways of undercoating -even spray painting, but I've found this to be too uneven, sometimes too thick and too expensive, Far better to use a couple of thin coats of watered down primer applied with a soft brush, allowing each coat to dry before putting on another. Tony Barton of AN fame recommends using matt white enamel and I find that works well, with the slight unevenness  from the brush strokes helping to act as a key. 

White undercoated French Guard Grenadiers

Many painting "experts" will tell you to mount each figure on a cork, wood block etc. which is all very well if you are painting large figures, character pieces or have more time than you know what to do with, but for the 15-20mm battalions, by far the best way is to mount the figures on strips of card wide enough to keep your fingers off the paint and flexible enough to bend.. It's amazing how much time you save just by not having to keep picking figures up and putting them back down. Paint all one side of a strip then flip it over and paint the other.

French Line Infantry ready for undercoating



Different painters have different ideas on undercoats. Most GW style painters will tell you to use a black undercoat, but this can give a muddy look to small scale figures. I find white gives the best results for dark uniformed figures and a light  to medium grey or pale blue best for white coated units. By all means use black, but before you do anything else, drybrush with the grey undercoat colour, then give a final coat, even more lightly dry brushed, of white as for the grey undercoated figures below

Grey undercoated Austrian Grenadiers

The Austrian Grenadiers with their final coat of white undercoat

       As you will see, the undercoating has given the Austrians a basic shaded effect, leaving them ready for colours adding..

The advantage of using white undercoat over the GW black is that you can use far thinner paint or several thin coats to guild up shade rather than thick coats to cover black.

Don't worry too much about neatness at this stage. You can always tidy up later on

The grenadiers with their basic colours added.



The finished units:-Grenadier Bttns of IRs 18 and 20

 

You can see the ink lining clearly on these figures

More thoughts on Campaign Games (#3)

More Thoughts on Campaign Games.

Casualty replacements.

In part 2, under "Forces" I gave quite a simple view on casualty replacement

"Many campaign rules intend for the initial forces to be just a start, with continual growth as new recruits are raised and reinforcements sent to the front. These campaign rules are unusual in that I've taken the opposite view -that the forces involved are assumed to represent the maximum force a nation can commit to a specific theatre. Unless all sides agree, this maximum cannot be exceeded.

This assumption leads to a situation where, instead of increasing, each players armies and resources are growing ever smaller and more precious and is intended to get players really thinking about their forces and trying to keep them intact rather than squandering them on what they think are heroic actions. Lines of communication and supply suddenly become very important as they maximise the chances of receiving reinforcements and minimizing desertion/losses."

On reading this through I feel as though it requires further explanation and, like other aspects of my rules, has developed.

Initially, no unit or formation could receive more than 90% replacement of casualties/stragglers etc, which meant that forces were ever smaller, with further reductions to the replacement rate based on situation -whether the force was in supply (linked to its magazines by a secure route) or out of supply, whether adverse weather (heat, cold, heavy rain etc) is affecting movement, whether the terrain is favourable to movement and the condition of the troops/horses themselves, in that tired/exhausted troops will be less likely to return to the colours than fresh ones. Furthermore, some armies -most notably the Spanish, had a most remarkable ability to recover troops swiftly after almost complete destruction/ dispersal.

This isn't to say that the troops who were defeated return to the colours without any loss of ability, just that their numbers are restored at a higher rate. This is because of  the Spanish people constantly feeding men into the military. Such units suffered a loss in quality as trained or experienced troops were replaced at least partially by raw, inexperienced or untrained recruits, so that any re-formed unit would be classed as at least 1 training/experience class lower than it had been before its dispersal. To simulate this, the Spanish forces should receive their complement of replacements in a shorter time than their opponents and at a higher rate. Similarly, armies such as the British in the Peninsula/Americas, French in Egypt/Indies should receive replacements at lower/slower rates due to distance from the field of conflict, whilst replacements to French/auxilliary forces in Spain would take perhaps twice as long to reach their destination.

So, does the army as a whole restore casualties at the same rate across the board, or does each unit that has taken casualties regain them at  a different rate?  Perhaps the best way would be to dice for each unit, with the highest training/experience groups (elites) dicing first for their part of the total replacement pot -upto the % replacement limit. After these would come the veterans, trained and raw units. this could lead to situations where the better class units take up all the replacement figures whilst those who would have been last to dice receive none. This reflects the greater likelihood of elite/veteran troops returning to the colours and that of the less well drilled and experienced to desert. In these cases, it should be assumed that the best troops from inferior units are reassigned to better ones, so that it is the worst units that shrink the fastest. I'm not going to suggest replacement percentages -we will all have our own ideas of what each circumstance would do to replacement levels.

The ONLY way to restore a unit to its full complement of troops in my mind is the amalgamation of battalions/squadrons/regiments that have fallen below viable numbers for purposes of the game, ie. too low in base morale. Amalgamated units -bataillons de march, provisional regiments, battalions of detachments &c are of necessity of lower class than the highest training class involved, ie. if a veteran and a trained unit amalgamate, the result would be a trained unit, if a 3rd, raw unit was added, the resulting unit would be "Raw." This allows for the amalgamated unit to need time to "gel" as a unit and for the better trained members to gain trust in their new, less well seasoned comrades. Again, I'm not going to suggest training levels for each variety of amalgamation (Yet?). It should be fairly obvious from the makeup of each battalion of detachments what their new training level should be. 

Amalgamated units regain training classes in the same way as any other unit, but do so at an enhanced rate. Usually, a unit will gain one class for every three battles in which they fight, but amalgamations progress after only two -Until they reach the training level of the highest rated element, after which progress is as normal. This system ensures that a given army doesn't simply improve until ALL non-elite units are "veteran" but that they always retain elements of untrustworthy "raw" troops.

I'd be interested in other peoples input on this.

 

Musings on Figure Scales

The release of the new Warlord Games “Epic Battles” Napoleonic range seems to have set off quite a discussion on scales and manufacturers choices and it set me off looking back over my many years as a Napoleonic gamer, student and historian.

So, whose “side” are the manufacturers of ranges/games such as Perry, Warlord, Flames of War, &c on? Obviously, they are primarily in business to make money, but, equally as obviously, they are dependent upon wargamers for business and these statements clearly needs to be in balance. Clearly, the desire for a “captive market” as evinced by altering accepted scales to non-standard ones such as 12.5mm lies on the “business side of the scales, but how much notice do the manufacturers take of their customers? We are seeing a situation where rules, even unit sizes are dependent not on any historic accuracy or imperative so much as what the market will bear in terms of price per box.

Of course, this isn't a new phenomena. The first company that really took this attitude was Games Workshop, with their “one stop shop” for gamers (particularly the young and parent financed) , their pre-digested rules and pre-packaged “history,” so of course, with so many of the current games designers/sculptors starting off with GW it's hardly surprising they try to follow the same business model. GW were the first to state that only THEIR products should be used in their games and encouraged their young gamers to not play anyone not sticking to this “rule.” Similarly, GW were the first company to up-scale from 25mm to 28, effectively freezing out the opposition at the expense of the gamers' pockets, with respect to their games.

Don't get me wrong, if these companies can persuade the marks to buy their products, fair enough, and, to be fair, they HAVE brought a lot of new blood into our hobby. I seriously doubt whether gaming has ever been as popular as it is now, for which we should be thankful, but on the down-side, we've LOST an awful lot of how the hobby used to be:- the anarchy, the individuality and, through the ubiquitous “source books,” “Googling” questions or asking on FB groups and such, expecting to find answers and details ready made, skills in researching and the desire to do so are diminished. I've no problem with newbies asking daft questions to get them going and we ALL have those problems we CAN'T find answers to and so need help, but it shouldn't become the only way we learn and develop our skills as painters, sculptors, players or history buffs.

It seems to me that interest in gaming a particular period has very little to do with importance of a particular conflict, the rules, the "feel" of it or anything else. What it boils down to is how much information is easily available. It helps explain why say, Napoleonic games are more common than the Age of Marlborough or the Seven Years War. I know from my own research into the armed forces of Tipu Sultan just HOW hard it is to find information on unusual periods, theatres or armies and how much of what we CAN find is wrong.

In a way, I'd love for us to go back to those early days. There was something a bit “fringe” about being a gamer. There was a hint of glamour and mystery about it that is lacking now, as if we were each going to be the victims of an “outing campaign.” At one time, there were even hints that the hobby was to be outlawed -made illegal. I can imagine being arrested in possession of a bag-full of dice on suspicion of being a wargamer. Does anyone else remember going to the “Triples” in Sheffield and having to run the gauntlet of Ban the Bomb protestors and Sally Army to get in?

Personally, I'm giving up on relying on manufacturing companies for my fix of minis. I'm investing in a 3D printer so I can fix my OWN scale and this I think is the way ahead for the hobby. I feel that with the increase in high quality STL files and improvements in technology and lowering prices that THIS will be the shape of things to come. Now, I don't know how the best of these files are made, but I suspect they involve re-enactors, costumes and 3D scanners. Using these, there is no reason why clubs and groups shouldn't produce their own figures. Such a scenario almost puts us back in the “good old days(?)” of the previous “golden age” and will hopefully lead to a return to more individuality in our hobby.

3D French Young Guard from STL files by Marco Campagna

The grey "ghosts" in the background are the rest of the Young Guard awaiting painting.

All that is good in wargaming does NOT spring from Games Workshop. In his essay “The Very Real Difference Between Historical and Non-Historical Wargaming” Jeffrey Knudsen of The War Artisan's Workshop states:-

"Historical gaming followed the path beaten by Warhammer." "Warhammer Historical was one the best things that happened to historical wargaming." "The wargaming world has caught up to Warhammer" "[the Warhammer rules] have turned into must-do concepts in our wargaming world, whether fantasy or historical." . . . which could only have been made by someone with a woefully shallow view of wargaming. While acknowledging that "everything in a Warhammer rules set will have been tried or published before", he seems unaware that it was constructed from mechanics that had been tried and abandoned by many historical wargame designers decades earlier, for good reasons. He also claims that it established an "archetype" and was built by "the best minds in the wargaming world", apparently without any awareness that he was propounding what would be recognized as unsupportable hype by anyone with wargaming experience outside of a very narrow range. He proclaims that, while Warhammer Ancients Battles is "still a fun set to play", it falls short of Warhammer Fantasy because of limited options, viz., "You can put Arthur on a horse, but not on a flying dragon." as if the pageantry, glory and romance of Arthurian England were not sufficient to hold one's interest without dragons. He also makes the mistake of judging the value of a rule set by its popularity. If that is a valid criterion, then we must judge a Hyundai to be an automobile superior to a Mercedes, since so many more people buy Hyundais. In his one-line comment at the close of the column the editor states (hopefully with just a touch of irony) "Rumour has it that the original Warhammer was formed around the solid principles of historical wargaming."

“Many of the most recent generation of wargamers seem only marginally concerned with, and often completely unaware of the hobby's origins. This lack of perspective leaves them unaware that fantasy and science fiction gaming is a very recent offshoot of an ancient and venerable practice, with its roots very firmly embedded in reality. I have even run across gamers who thought that historical wargames were a recent, niche development of fantasy and science fiction gaming(!). Fantasy and Sci-fi gaming came very late to the dance and, in spite of its current popularity, had no influence on the development of the more general hobby until the last few decades. In its recent explosion of popularity it has differentiated itself from its ancestor so dramatically as to become virtually a different hobby altogether. “

“Wargaming being primarily a social hobby, social divides have arisen between those who embrace the newer styles as part of a larger and increasingly diverse hobby and those who persevere in the original, historically based games. Conflict and friction have developed over space in gaming venues, retail establishments, and hobby publications and invective flies back and forth, with those who clung to the older style accusing the others of being juvenile and frivolous, and the proponents of the newer styles characterizing the others as stuffy and elitist. Other rifts opened within each genre between those who prefer rigid, tournament-style games and those who indulge in more cinematic and narrative types, between those who savor bottom-up, nuts and bolts simulations and those who enjoy top-down command studies. These differences are often highlighted and aggravated by vocal proponents of one faction or another who are all too ready to disparage the others and defend their own favored genre and style as superior. Under these pressures, the already small hobby of adventure gaming has inevitably splintered into even smaller, niche sub-hobbies. (I make no value judgment on this trend; I merely note it as fact.) However, some of the most strident declarations come not from the fans of a particular genre, but from the generalist gamers who blithely cross between genres and styles in pursuit of a good game. For these gamers, the game is all-important and the subject matter is either secondary or irrelevant. They seem to prefer themes that are colorful and dramatic, but they are indifferent to the source of the material, be it taken from the pages of history books, literature, or film. The miniatures or other game components have no meaning for them beyond their function in the game, and the mechanics of the game have no significance for them beyond their utility in winning. As far as they are concerned, any game with historical playing pieces is a "historical wargame", regardless of any dissimilarity between what happens in the game and what actually happened historically. For someone who comes to wargaming primarily because it is a vivid and dynamic way to engage military history (that is, someone for whom the subject matter is of primary importance), this attitude is difficult to understand; and, because the history of war is a grim and serious subject, it definitely rubs the historical wargamer the wrong way when someone insists that what he is doing is no more than "playing with toy soldiers", and can never be anything more. This is akin to claiming that, because you only use your pencil to draw stick figures, therefore my pencil cannot draw a portrait or a still life. Though there are superficial similarities between historical and non-historical gaming (the use of dice, miniatures or counters, maps or terrain), a profound difference lies in the way in which they are used. If games were not capable of being anything more than play, they would not find such useful and widespread application in business, the military, and the social sciences. Even more obnoxious is the generalist gamers' insistence that the purely historical gamer must include other genres as being part of his hobby, and must welcome them at venues where historical gamers gather to partake of their mutual interest in military history. This is patently ridiculous, akin to insisting that an association of landscape artists must include house painters because they also use brushes and paints, or that a gathering of bakers must include barbecue chefs because they are both "just making food." This blindness to disparity is a natural result of indifference to the content and purpose of historical gaming. The inability (or refusal) to perceive a difference between historical gaming and other genres does not mean that no difference exists, any more than the inability of a color-blind individual to perceive a difference between red and green means that they are the same color. “

In a way, our games have become subject to the whims of fashion, behind which games and figure designers hide. How often have you started collecting a range of models for a particular game only to find it has been discontinued, re-sized or re-worked so completely you have to begin collecting again? Old sets of rules that served us well for many years have been replaced by newer (and therefore better?) sets, using new and “better” systems that appear to be more to produce quick games than any historical accuracy. Old rules are decried as being “proven wrong” or as outdated, (though how you “prove” a set of rules or assumptions wrong I don't understand.) even, as with Quarries rules, “racist,” replacing them with ones that treat every army as identical in ability and requiring “army lists” or “victory conditions” that slew the games even more than the supposedly “bad” older rules. So many “modern” rule sets appear to have very little actual Napoleonic content beyond the minis and are proudly proclaimed as “having a Napoleonic flavour” which is a bit like the difference between vanilla essence and extract. In some, even the most basic concepts, figure, ground and time scales appear to have vanished, with basing conventions grossly distorting unit depths. Certainly most modern rules seem to be unable to deal with re-creating (simulating) the warfare of our period in all but the simplest of ways without masses of "special rules" to cover events the basics don't cater for. Fair enough, we don't always WANT to simulate warfare accurately, but to me at least, a game is far more enjoyable if it IS reasonably accurate history-wise.

Ironically, despite so many players calling Bruce Quarries venerable rules, with their "National Characteristics," racist, it is amazing how popular the WW2 game "Flames of War" is, given that it relies heavily on national characteristics and stereotypes. Perhaps colour photos, "idiot sheet" style explanations and the fact everything is pre-digested and new makes up for that.