1940 Global table & painted pieces

@trenacker
I’ve been painting some pieces the last two weeks. I’m having trouble with Rustoleum Lemongrass for the UK. The paint doesn’t apply very well. I use Eden for USA, French blue for France, rustic orange for Japan, flat gray for Germany. Lemongrass is just a pain for whatever reason.

@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.

When I painted my units, I had issues with Britain, I originally made 2 schemes, then decided I only wanted the tan, not green… On my painting, I used a combo of lacquer Enamel and acrylic, it was at the enamel stage, but I soaked them in paint thinner (in all preparation to consider them toast and order new units)… but they came clean, they soaked for 10 min or so, and I used my tooth brush (yes mine lol, bristle’s turned green, and yes, I still use it, the green faded away HAHA) to scrub away the paint film.

Very nice indeed.

@jwo1984:

hey guys, so I was searching some camo desert schemes for HBG’s Valentine medium tank and came across this one. � However looking at the sculps I knew it would be tough to paint these blue lines in because most of the tank is all track! so I cut out and shaped some track guard armour like the photo below just using some clear flexible plastic and glued in too the sides…making these two tanks mk II’s which look to have had the side armour as a pose to the Mk V that HBG has sculpted.

I’m sure whatever you do too it, it will turn out great. Can’t wait too see it painted. Good luck buddy! :-D

@robbie358:

Hello all.  I thought I would solicit your thoughts on which types of pieces in any version of A&A scream for painting the most.

IMHO, the most confusing piece on the board in the original Pacific and Pacific 1940 is the USA fighter in China.  Having to differentiate between a Chinese fighter that looks American and any USA fighters in that zone seems like a headache waiting to happen.

Otherwise, I would say the pro-Axis and pro-Allies neutrals in Europe 1940 need attention.  The fact is that upon being attacked, you’re supposed to pick any random country to donate an infantry to that territory.  If the attacker doesn’t win, the infantry stay there but cannot be moved.  Seems like confusion might set in eventually.

Your thoughts?

HBG has British infantry for sale. I bought 25 and painted them white to use for neutral armies.

What’s your running cost for a fully painted set of say… one nation?

Is it per piece or?

Like if I take my Europe, OOB set of German pieces, and send them to him, what would you expect the price range to be?

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: