John Brown's Completed Painted German Forces!

I’ve tried priming these twice and the primer just won’t stick. Are these a different plastic somehow?

@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.

https://www.facebook.com/pg/Landing-Vehicle-Tracked-LVT4-2017381051873202/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2201403350137637

I’ve gotten several private messages and some responses in this thread… so just as a head’s up and a community service…

Because of the private messages, I have ALREADY made a deal to unload my custom units, and they are, in-fact, already mailed off.

I know its kinda pointless now, but if you’re still that curious as to what I did have, here’s the complete list of the custom HBG units I had purchased in the last few weeks to beef up my bins… since I later made a decision to pull them and not use them, I did eventually re-order equivalent numbers of default/original OOB A&A units from HBG to beef up my numbers (like if I didn’t like the two HBG Japanese Fuso battleships, I reordered two OOB Kongo or Yamato battleships to replace them… so-on and so-on.  Anyways, here’s the (now kinda pointless) list:

(BTW: you may notice that for the most part, planes are missing from this list… I found most custom HBG aircraft to be good enough and scaled well enough to survive my “off-scale axe”.  So there are many HBG planes like P-47s and F4F/Hellcats that survived the cut and made it into my permanent bins)

HBG Battle Pieces (custom units)

US - Olive Drab:
5x Pershing Tanks
5x M5 Stuart tanks
15x M4A3 Sherman tanks
5x P-51 fighters

5x Essex CVs
5x South Dakota BBs
2x Nevada BBs
5x Baltimore CAs

UK - Tan:
10x Churchill Tanks
10x Valentine Tanks

5x Ark Royal CVs
3x King George V BBs

Russia - Brown
2x KV-2 tanks
11x T-34 tanks
4x T-26 tanks

German - Black
2x Schleswig Holstein BBs
2x Seydlitz CVs
8x Pz-III tanks

Japan - Pumpkin Orange:
10x Type 97 tanks
5x Ki-43 fighters
2x G8N Rita bombers

2x Kaga CVs
2x Ryujo CVs
5x Nagato BBs
2x Fuso BBs
5x Mogami cruisers
5x I-400 subs

MyHBGrejects.jpg

Rich,

**––NICE WORK on your Italians. I remember seeing these fella’s in the
'39-Advanced" game we recently played. Although I was mainly concerned with the Pacific theater as USA & Anzac,…my S-2 Inteligence Officer pointed them out to me (Grin).

Tall Paul**

@John:

I don’t know what everyone else likes, but I like videos. For example, you showing everyone how to put these I 94 decals on or how you do those awesome dry brush techniques, you are always talking about, or the whole process of a painted piece, from the time you prime it to the finishing coat, including how to place the decals on.

Any of those would be cool videos! :-D

Good to know! I have never tried videos, as I don’t have the camera skills (or the camera, for that matter) to film close up like that. I have friends around who have the equipment though, so I might give it a shot.

@jwo1984:

Hey spitfire… I liked the layout of yor original painting tutorial… With stages photos befores and afters with descriptions under each photo and stage.  I would like too see some face washes you use on infantry men. And some washes you use for a variety of infantry moulds. Even a gallery too showcase some of your personal playing pieces would be cool!

I will definitely do a tutorial on washes! I’m planning on doing another in depth infantry tutorial, so that will feature the face washes you’re talking about.

@BJCard:

@Swedo:

Thank you, im not happy with the US star, i hate doing stars, they always look crooked. Tobad my russian carriers will probably never see action :(

You could just houserule a Russian carrier starting in the Baltic- hey, it is your house, your rules!

Awesome!

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?