Monday, January 18, 2016

1/72 Scale Bolt Action





I've been doing a lot of gaming with our gaming club, and one thing that has stood out (besides the beautiful tables), has been how large we have had to make the playing space for a good participation 28mm Bolt Action game. Rather than keep making the tables larger, I decided to play around with scale and drop down to 1/72 scale. I also decided to try and paint the full armies(220+ miniatures) win under a week.  The miniatures I picked to experiment with are not the best sculpts, but they were inexpensive, and should hold up to convention games in addition to our club use. My hope is that this scale change makes it possible to run a couple of infantry platoons, tank platoons, and forward HQ units in the same footprint our 28mm models were using.

Did I finish painting them all. No. But I think I made enough of a start that these can be used in a normal game of Bolt Action.  For the full Normandy game, I'll have to churn through more than 50 additional models. At least all of the bases were done ahead of time!

6 comments:

  1. Wow! You are a machine...How do you manage to paint so much so quickly? I am envious of your skills. I look forward to seeing some shots of games in action.

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  2. Same comment and praise as Steven. How do you manage to paint to such a high quality so quickly?

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  3. Same comment and praise as Steven. How do you manage to paint to such a high quality so quickly?

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    1. The quality is not great when you look really close. It is more of an optical illusion. I use an airbrush to lay down most of the colors. For the Americans it meant that I used an airbrush to put the brown of the pants on first, and then followed that with the tan. Using my fingernail as a mask, I kept most of the overspray off of the brown when the tan was going on. I followed that up with a heavy wash from Secret Weapon Miniatures. I used Storm Cloud on the Germans, and Dark Sepia on the Americans. The SWM washes go on really well, so there is little pooling. I needed that so it would minimize cleanup afterwards. I still have to add highlights to the flesh, but that will come later after these guys have enjoyed a few games. Basically I plan out the painting process entirely at the start. I then batch paint.

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  4. where they zveda kits? can you tell me more about them? or the size of the basing that you used.. thanks!

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    1. These are plastic soldier company miniatures, basically a company in a box. The bases are from Renedra or something similar to that. The come as little green plastic disks.

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