Friday 15 January 2010

ARVN Painting Plans

It's got to the all important painting stage with the ARVN Mechanised Infantry Regiment which is now waiting to be spray undercoated matt black, depending on the good old British weather and consequent temperature in my garage.

I haven't painted any 10/12mm stuff for a couple of years and, in the interests of wargaming science, I've been looking for some spot on techniques by asking some of the chaps at the club for advice. Dave, in particular, seems to be able to produce well painted armies at the drop of a hat, with the latest being his excellent 10mm Pithead Hungarians.


This is his very neat approach, which I'm sure he won't mind sharing:

1. Superglue figs to base, leave to dry.
2. Undercoat black, leave to dry.
3. Woodglue sand to base, covering fig bases too, leave to dry.
4. Paint sand (GW Graveyard Earth) leave to dry.
5. Drybrush base with Bleached Bone.
6. Paint figs.
7. Use more Earthpaint to add grass patches to base. Superglue the occasional bush in place.
8. Spray with matt varnish.
9. Admire.

I'm going to try something similar with the ARVN, although I have an unnatural aversion to undercoating in black for some reason, despite its almost universal usage for small scale armour painting. So, I'm going to trawl through my collection of Vallejo, Foundry and GW paints this weekend to devise a scheme that will hopefully do the ARVN justice.

3 comments:

  1. One thing you might want to consider with the bases is looking at Vietnam first. To the best of my recollection most pictures of vehicles and troops in the war showed the earth to be very red brown consequently Graveyard Earth would just not look right...

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  2. Thats a good point GW dark flesh is a nice red brown that might work well.

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  3. Steve,

    Dave suggested using a terracotta colour, which should work well, although I've used Foundry chestnut brown before and that might be a good match for Vietnamese earth.

    Thanks for the GW dark flesh idea Jon, I'll give it a try.

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