How To Paint Wargames Figures

The range and the scale of these figures are huge. The range of games that are played with war games figures is huge. You can have games from sort of the Norman Conquest Saxon figures right through to Second World War figures.

Fantasy Second World War through to recreating in detail exact military conflicts that have actually occurred in history. All using usually, sort of, the 28 mm figure. I have got a few examples of the different variety.

These are some sort of pulp 1930s figures here, which in no way is fantasy. You know, that is completely, of a real era and real people ranging right through to these sort of figures here which are, I mean, it may be a caricature of a clam figure which will be used to get in different table top games. Moving right through to a figure like this one which is basically, that's a 28 mm figure, there, I'll put it down where you can see it's on different, it's a large completely fantasy monster which will be used for a fantasy war game.

Going right through to this figure here which is a largest scale figure and that's a Second World War caricature. That's a different sort of scale. So, the war game figures and the war games sort of cover a huge area of gaming.

So, I'm just putting this base coat, base colour on to the figure. If you find that you have 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. So, what I'm going to do to bring out the detail on this is I'm just going to take a darker brown colour; just squash and put it on the palate and mix with fair bit of white so, it almost has a consistency of a brown ink.

You see it's picking out the detail. You can see that where it once just looked like a brown nothing, suddenly with this wash the liquid runs in to the areas and that picks out the detail. So, I have not actually painted any detail on there.

I'm going to show you how to do a technique called dry brushing. Basically, you want to use an old brush which is pretty much the opposite of what you want a good brush to be. So, if you look at a good brush, you'll see that it's got very fine point on it, whereas one of these older brushes is just coming in powder and you want to take the ultramarine blue colour.

Give it a shake. Now, what you do with this is you put paint on the brush, like that, and then you take in most of the paint off the brush. Drag the brush across the figure and what that is doing is highlighting out the riches.

You will keep doing layer after layer of this dry brushing, until you get this. It's basically turned blue, but the areas are indented like these little groups on leg and on the face have stayed black. So, I'm going to show you how to do this top leg bit.

It's literally just - put in a line of paint on the very top edge of the leg like that. I've put a thin line of ice blue on there. Another technique would be to put a thin line of white on there and then wash that with blue.

And that's how you paint war game figures. .