The long road of painting the units - Updated 1/16 Vid added

I am working on painting my 1914 game pieces and would love to see what you all have done. Especially naval, artillery and plane units. Thanks!

@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.

Part 4: Starting the ships, adding decals to the tanks, skin tones on the soldiers

Today spent some time adding paint to the sprayed ships, including painting the water jettisons on the subs black (this was very tricky and ended up looking a little sloppy). Advice for painting the jettisons: toothpicks are not small enough! If you do use toothpicks, you’ll have to dab a dot of black for each tiny jettison.

The battleships were a bit easier, and painting the decks, bridge, and smoke stacks were all done in silver. I plan on adding the final grey coat last after the deck and stacks/bridge dry. I experimented with how to add the national emblem, and will probably opt for a white background with a red dot on the bow of the ship. In the future I may do that with the rear end of the ship.

I painted the tranny smoke stacks silver and added a white background for the emblem on the destroyers. All in all, the Japanese navy is coming along nicely.

The armor is pretty much done. I added a white flag to the front side of the armor and will be adding the red dots later. For the aircraft, I’ll be adding a red band around the rear part of the plane. I was debating between sky blue and red and may alternate just for some variety.

The soldiers got some skin! And I just want to say that adding the paint alone brings out the contours of their facial features in an excellent manner on their own. I may add a touch of black to certain areas of the face but that will be a last step. The next step will be panting their uniforms, rifles, and helmets.

After all this is done, I will be spray painting the japanese bombers white, the aircraft carrier black, and then will add the details to those. The Japanese are about 55% done all in all and I’m pleased with the results so far even if they do look a bit amateurish. Stay tuned.

IMG_6405.JPG IMG_6404.JPG IMG_6403.JPG IMG_6402.JPG

I like the crane for effect.  Besides we know they have built in AA in them.

In case this is useful, here’s a page which shows photos of all the sculpt types in A&A 1941 (http://www.axisandallies.org/p/axis-allies-1941-preview-unit-details-and-abilities/) along with a list of how many sculpts of each type are in the game.  Clicking on each picture will give you an enlarged version.

I never converted to V2.

I’ve been able to add a few new planes thanks to some Shapeways modelers. These include the Polish PZL 11 and Romanian IAR 80.

If there is enough interest maybe we can get more models made.

You can search shapeways for the two models I reference. The air game has stats for the IAR.
My stats for the PZL are as follows:

AI 7/5
AV 3/2
cost 9
defense 4/4
SA: aircraft, anti-air, slow

The slow ability means that a decent plane would have a big advantage on this guy, as it should.

I can post the final pics when I’m done painting. And I can post a pic to the air game cards I created for a Veteran and Average PZL 11 if anyone wants.

Paul - yeah… I applaud your stance on transport planes being separated from bombers.  I couldn’t agree with you more - my own rule is purely for simplicities sake for my 50th, it actually kinda bothers me still.  I only play A&A with my ‘old crews’ about twice a year (when I visit the states), otherwise my 50th hosts some players that haven’t played nearly as long as us - though all are interested in WWII history.  So I have to try and keep the piece differentiations to minimum.

George - no worries, they’re Italians so they should get a long with my guys  :wink:
Fantastic collection!  Like the individuality that those figs offer - I don’t own any, so are they pretty much the same size as the OOB?  Looks like it (except for the stands of course).  Gotta love those SS!  “HOLD ZE LINE!”
That one Italian bomber… would never thought that shade of orange could be pulled off, but it looks pretty cool.  Might have to give that one a try.

@HBG wow