How To Paint Realistic Military Figures

I've got this box. It's Tamiya military figures, they're 1/35 scale. Basically, when you get them out of the box, they're on sprues like this.

You need to do a bit of work to get them up to being paintable. The first thing that you need to do is take them off the sprues. I would recommend using a pair of these nippers to get them off the sprue in the first stage.

Once you've got them off the sprue you can cut with a knife. Once you've got it to that stage, you've taken all the sprues off, you need to take the flash off, which is where the plastic molds have met and you'll find a fine line on there, so I recommend using a sharp knife and just scraping that. So once you've got that prepared, you've taken all the flash off, you've got the parts, you will need to assemble it, which is what I've done here with this one: this one's been fully assembled.

He's got the water bottle, the few little extras that come one the sprues and will need to be added to the figure. Now, I've undercoated that in this Citadel foundation grey colour, which is a very good colour for undercoating. It's a high pigment paint as well, so that undercoat is fine, and it's a nice colour to begin work on.

So, I've got it to that stage. These figures are sort of Second World War US military infantry, so their uniforms are going to be green. If you want to be historically accurate with this, then you can do a lot of research into the exact colours and there are an awful lot of different model paints out there to buy, but I'm just going to go with a sort of.

I've got a couple of different colours of green here, one which is actually called a Camo green, although it's a little bit light.

So I'm just putting this base coat, base colour onto the figure, if you find that you've painted a colour on which is too light or too dark, then that can be altered with using a combination of dry brushing or washes. Just paining this figure in this green. Obviously, when you're putting the first coat on, it's not going to pick out any of the details on the figure.

So now, I've got this base coat of green onto the main parts of the uniform of the figure, I'm going to give it a wash with a darker green, which will pull out the highlights and the wash colour will flow into the areas and just basically pull out all the detail on the figure. So, what I'm going to do for a wash is take a darker green colour onto the palette here and to add a fair bit of water, so it's quite runny inky. I'm just going to put this watery paint onto the figure like that, and you can see straight away that it's pulling out, it's highlighting the folds in the fabric and the pockets on the jacket and you're going to get the ink going into all the little, well, I say ink, but it is paint, it's just watered down, but it suddenly pulls it out.

So you're looking basically at something which just looks like a flat green, to suddenly the whole area being highlighted like that. You would keep going on that to get all the various shades in. As you can see, it's not a matter of painting the detail on, it's just literally adding that watery and it just goes into all the recesses of the figure.

So I've got to a stage here with this uniform where some of the highlights were picked out, I'll just show you quickly how to do the face. I've got this colour, which is strangely called Vomit Brown, but it's actually a very good flesh colour. This is a similar technique to the one that I used with the fabric on the uniform: I'm literally going to just paint the face, so I'm just coating this face with this colour called Vomit Brown, which is actually flesh colour.

Obviously, you'd go on to do the hands in the same manner, just coating that. What I do then, once this actual flesh colour is dried, is take a brown colour, which you could use this Scorched Earth one or this brown colour, and do a wash exactly the same as I did on the uniform previously. Those darker brown colours will go int