Painted some of my A&A

@Spitfire38:

@LHoffman:

Great work sir! Your superstructure work on the ships really makes it stand out.

Agreed! Do you wash the superstructure (and sides/hull, or no?) and then paint the wooden decks?

@LHoffman:

Great work sir! Your superstructure work on the ships really makes it stand out.

i do make extensive use of washes on all my pieces(except some aircraft)and the ships superstructures also generally benefit from a dry brush before getting a coat of wash.

I rely heavily on army painted spray paint to get the pieces to a colour I can work straight from. Most of my fleets get sprayed grey as a first Step.

Every nation I’ve done so far I’ve used a different method. There are similarities and common approaches but it order to make each fleet look unique and like all its components belong together I’ve not used the exact same method/colours…yet… Once I get started on some of the minor nations I’ll have to retread methods with only the national colour changing.

I often do the whole fleet in one hit and just wing it as I go and see what happens. For instance on the French I had no plan until I sat down and looked at the spray painted pieces and thought a clean and lighter set of colours would pair well with the national blue. That would end up on the hulls…

I do superstructure first as the drybrush and wash is very difficult to keep tidy. Depending what I want the decks to look like I may paint them before the wash and coat them in at the same time. If I didn’t include the deck in the wash I’ll pick that out next which is probably the most time consuming part as you really can’t afford to get deck paint onto your superstructure at this stage… Once you get use to a particular sculpt you get quicker and quicker. Then the hulls get a quick paint with either the national colour or a shade of grey. Probably knock out a 40 ish piece fleet in a solid 2 hour stint but I rarely do the whole job in one sitting. The roundels I’ve painted have been really easy(not done US or soviets) and that’s probably a 10-20 minute job for a fleet.

Since its been many years since I started and by just winging the method I’ve actually forgotten the exact colours to use on most of my older jobs… I’ll be able to reverse engineer them though if I wanted to add new sculpts or units to the existing stuff.

I’m getting ready to do that HBG order and getting piece to bulk up a few things. I’ve got none of the 1941 sculpts and now I’m looking at subbing them in for previous pieces. Also getting pieces to do up a range of minor powers and neutrals.

I’ve got most of the HBG sets anyway but I’m just bulking up some piece counts to give me a decent enough amount to do each nation.

I’d actually really like some battle of the bulge or Guatal Canal style maps that focus on a campaign rather than a theatre just so i could get more use out of these HBG pieces.

In home again! Thing that’s bothered me the most about air units is how they just lay flat…. Well once I started painting them I realized that wasn’t gonna be good enough… So.

Also here’s a head count of my painted infantry and artillery…. Somethings are clearly falling behind.

I’ve clocked up quite a few hours on these over the last few days however quite a bit of it has been fitting the flight stands…. I’d be coming up to 100 done so far if not already past it.

Flight stands are actually just some thumb tacks I got from a office shop. They come 40 to a box for the small headed ones and 20 a box for the larger ones… Either size is only $3 a box!!!

They all use the smaller sized base. My plan would be for fighters, tac bombers and jet fighters to use the small bases with transports, medium bombers and heavy bombers using the bigger bases…. I would have liked the bombers to be higher but the pins only come in the on we length.

I’ve been working on my US planes but they are pretty boring since I’m resorting to decals for the U.S. Roundel and I haven’t even order them yet so they just look like blue planes with painted cockpits. I went with the navy’s blue planes since it’s a fairly unique scheme and now that my planes have stands which will get done in the national colour I don’t have to worry about making the aircraft the same color as the rest of the units.

Hitting a dead end with my US planes and anticipating the same thing with the soviet aircraft I decided to fire up my first minor nation!

I’ve only finished these but I also have the land units about 70% done on my painting table.

Still working on those Dutch ground forces… But in the meantime… Finland has an airforce!

I’ll try and take some pictures of my main paint brush but I think you’ll be surprised at its size.

I probably should be focusing on finishing off all the unit option for the core nations before I do anymore work on the minors but these are way more interesting at the moment.

My minor builds will include
12 infantry
6 artillery
6 tanks
4 mech infantry
4 AA guns
6 fighters
3 tac bombers
3 strategic bombers

If they have a navy they get
3 subs
3 desgroyers
2 cruisers
2 transports

Plus I’m likely gonna include expanded units
6 light tanks(or medium if first tank was light)
2 trucks
2 armored cars
2 SPG
2 tank destroyers
1 elite infantry
1 transport
1 paratrooper

Welp. Finland round one is nearly done.  Just need to finish off the 3 strategic bombers which I started to do in a different scheme but decided against it….

And the Netherlands round one is done!!

Next will be Finland and the Netherlands navies! I’ve actually not worked on a single ship in this current round of painting