1940 Global table & painted pieces

@vodot High praise from you!

@cavestone I also use vallejo paints. The key question here is are you brush painting, or using an airbrush, or both?

The Vallejo paints have a “Model Air” line that comes pre-thinned. You can buy a thinning product (from them) to add to the “Model Color” series paints, which are the exact same thing, just more concentrated and thicker.

If you’ve never used an airbrush, its a bit finicky–it requires regular cleaning and a without a good brush and compressor the paint will flow very inconsistently. The process will be very frustrating unless you use the pre-thinned paints because the brush can only blow paint that is within a certain set of thickness parameters that are difficult to achieve, especially if you are trying to mix the air in the brush’s reserve or in small quantities. That’s why having copies of both Model Air and Model Color is fine by me–unlike Warhammer 40K I’m using primarily earthy colors, greens, dunkelgelb and dunkelgrau… other AFV and camoflage colors and so i don’t need a collection of primary or bright colors.

But I recommend it. The airbrush creates a sublime, beautiful layer and slight mix variations can be used to create shadows, grades, etc. Then you go back over with your brush, adding highlights, lines, details. Then, back over again with a drybrushing…then back to the airbrush to blast Flory Wash all over it.

Can’t see your photos, you can’t post photos until you have a certain post count. I wouldn’t use water to thin paints, they are water soluble but the mix and viscosity is all wrong (though water is obv. cheap and easy to clean up)

As for oil-based paints, these require thinner to clean up, they are much more difficult to drybrush with and are not used for airbrushing. The days of the old testors paints is long behind us–even apple barrel paints are easier to work with and cheaper. The early painting methods were much more about glomming thick layers of paint onto lead miniatures and the modern approach with water based paint and a series of different techniques creates much better results.

@barnee thanks, I was inspired after watching Midway to do them like that, and to differentiate them from fighters for my less observant friends. I liked it so much I did my Stukas and Japanese tacs the same way as well.

@Der:

From the War Room in Illinois…

Fantastic… love the hats, love the look of all your customizations, and love that you got a lady in your group.

I’ll tweet those pics today.

Fantastic!  Especially love seeing the whole army together - the Ruskie horde!

Guys,

@coachofmany:

very nice!
**––I’m glad you enjoyed them. Lord knows I CERTAINLY ENJOY HBG’S PRODUCTS!

Tall Paul**

what was the outcome of this?
was the pieces returned?

since its christmas please tell me this had a happy outcome  :-)

(just curious, I haven’t bought anything from mclovin)

this first pic is what i had been using, i manually printed things out in one page sections via “print selection” command and pieced them all together, and laminated them with clear packing tape. Ultimately it proved to be a little larger than the default gameboard like I wanted, but still sloppy looking and with some bumps here and there which complicated unit placement due to tipping or sliding:

it was larger enough than the default board that things in europe didn’t seem so crowded anymore, but shoddy looking still, and that can wear on the nerves.

So I finally said enough is enough, and took the map pdf file on a jump drive down to minuteman press in London Kentucky and had them blow it up and laminate it….it costed $118 IPCs U.S. Dollars.

Its 2 foot by 3 foot, and gives us plenty of room for stacks. I got tired of kenny’s fat fingers knocking over my german stacks and scattering them across europe…he says my money was wasted because “those damn germans were going across europe anyway I just helped you out is all”.

but here it is: