Alex McE- Painting the Betterer Looking Baddies

Alex is back, this time with some paint on some Insurgents- Watch out ISAF, the Red Beret comes for you!

Before starting on painting, I needed to strip the old paint off the Qud (Empress Insurgents- Ed).

How I strip paint

Two words: Simple Green. I get mine from Bunnings or Mitre 10 (Big hardware stores in NZ-Ed) and usually in 1 litre bottles. I usually give models a soak in Simple Green for 24 hours, sometimes up to 48, and then pull them out and give them a scrub with a stiff toothbrush. That gets a lot of paint off pretty easily. Then I'll grab a scalpel and very gently use the point to scrape paint out of any deep grooves. I also use the tip to scratch over large flat areas (not an issue here) and that sometimes lifts paint off in sheets! After that, I go back over with a second, drier brush. If the majority of the paint hasn't come off it goes back in the Simple Green for another 24 - 48 hours and repeat.

Once I'm happy with the clean, the models go in water for 24 hours. I have found that Simple Green sticks to models and can stop superglue setting properly and occasionally make primer not stick. Then I'll let them air dry and occasionally give it one last run over with a dry toothbrush. Rough is good at this point. Once that's done, they're pretty well good to go.

These Taliban insurgents have proven to be very hard to get clean although not as bad as some Privateer Press plastics I'm trying to clean at the mo. I think it's a result of the bad primer job. It’s just meant a touch more manual intervention that I would normally have liked.

Anyway, on to PAINTING!

Stage One

These are the first six Empress insurgents out of the paint stripper. I glued them onto the base before work this morning. They're mostly clean although the long weekend of soaking has stained some of the metal. It happens. Primer covers it fine.

Stage Two

Now with added cat! I tried to get him to pose in the photo but he knows when I'm trying to make him look silly. The basing I'm using is a bit of an experiment. If I really, really hate it, I can change it but I wanted some more texture than I usually get with just polyfilla (spackle for North American readers- Ed)

I still use GW black primer. I'm really fond of it and other than the priming disaster on these models it has not ever let me down. Although I have learned recently that there are better ways that I’ll elaborate on when I get to discussing my camo paint schemes.

Stage Three

And here we are with the first three done:

On the left, my Afghan Warlord in a US Woodland flak vest. He’s ex-ANP so rocking the grey coveralls and mirror shades. The chap next to him is enjoying US Woodland pants. The chap on the right is rolling with his LAW and some European Camo pants.

The three currently on the block are all wearing items in British Desert DPM and the challenge at this point is finding some complementary block colours for their other clothing items. The next ones I’ll be having a go at the very detailed British DPM.

The photos aren’t great – my average phone camera isn’t great – but once I’ve got the next three finished, I’ll get someone with a decent photos of all six, including some closeups and a list of colours and instructions.

Army composition
Don't ask me about force composition yet. I haven't the foggiest. I'm likely to wind up painting a lot of stuff to make up the many options that *could* be used. At this stage that's looking like a dozen Foreign Fighters, 17 Taliban infantry including light support weapons and, if Pooch* gets his way, some Taliban motorbikes and a couple of heavier support weapons. Will all that get done? Who knows?

*he is a bad man (That is not true, Pooch is a wonderful person who should be listened to at all times, especially in terms of buying and modelling more figures to play more games of Sangin- Ed).

We've already cooked up one random side project from this…

Alex