PAINT BRUSHES

I thought a few words on brushes might be useful.

As much as possible I  use sable brushes. Although they are expensive I find they last and give a much better finish. They also hold the paint very well. For basic painting of screw soldiers and vehicles I tend to use brushes with man made fibres as the threads of screws tend to be hard on sable brushes and other fibres tend to be too soft so it becomes difficult to get the basic olive drab paint into the nooks and cranies of vehicles. However be warned, I find that man made fibre brushes wear out maybe quicker than you might expect.

For screws I use a number 5 brush both for the basic green uniform colour and the overlaying varnish. Rank and arm of service colours are added with a OO sable brush. For vehicles I also use a number 5 brush but wheels and horses are painted, both primer and finished colour, with a number 3 sable brush. Flags are also done with a number 3 for the primer and basic colour with detail executed with a OOO sable brush.

I am a great believer in stirring paint thoroughly. I stir every time I open a pot, even if I used it only hours before. I use round modelling wood sticks for stirring, a specific stirrer for each and every colour which are wiped after use. I also make sure there is a little fresh paint around the rim of the tin to ensure a good seal when the lid is fitted.
As mentioned before I use Humbrol paints. I also use their thinners, a bit expensive but very effective.

In my last post I mentioned painting a heavy weapons battalion. This is now completed and the soldiers have been laid out on the display shelf as shown below.

As can be seen the battalion is not yet fully equipped. The four utility trailers ( medical, signals, kitchen and water ) are present together with the 8 limbers. Still awaited are  four GS wagons, four ammunition wagons, 8 caissons and of course the 8 heavy machine guns themselves. Construction of these guns will be fully covered in a future post. This is the 11th of 12 such battalions.
In addition I am also working on another cavalry regiment. I am photographing the various painting stages so that I can post the whole sequence in one go so as to compliment the previous post on the construction of cavalry.  On the same basis I am also building a batch of GS wagons and will post both the construction and painting processes all in one post. I hope these two posts will be published over the next couple of weeks.

With regard to the current soldier painting schedule, I have just completed yet another infantry battalion. This was already underway before I completed the artillery battalions mentioned previously. I usually have two units on the go at any one time.

This photo shows the infantrymen themselves, 216 strong.

This photo shows the officers, NCOs, medical, quartermaster, signals and staff support soldiers, some 104 strong giving a total battalion strength of 320. With this battalion, which has already been placed on a display shelf, I now have 52 infantry battalions in total.

I have started the next unit as well. This is a heavy weapons battalion. By heavy weapons I mean carriage mounted machine guns of which they will have 8 such weapons.

So far the soldiers have been painted in uniform green and the flags are primed. I will cover the making of flags in a later blog. Although the platoons are the same size as in infantry battalions, there are only two platoons in each company rather than  three as in each infantry company and only four companies rather than the six in an infantry battalion hence the heavy weapons battalion strength is only 198.  I intend to do some blogs on the organisation of the army in the near future.

If by some chance you have read this blog in the past you may notice the order of some articles has changed. Basically instead of grouping subjects in "techniques" I have moved to the use of labels instead. I think this will make it much easier to access information on specific topics. However to do this meant cutting and pasting bits of older articles into new ones hence the huge number of apparently new posts today. Apart from this post all the others with today's date are just old posts reorganised, I hope for the better.

TRAILER SHAFTS.

I have mentioned previously that I use flat toothpicks for the above. I will cover the use of the large toothpick for wagons later but for now will discuss the smaller item that I use for trailers and guns. The source is Home Bargains wooden flat toothpicks. I take a toothpick, cut it to length, drill a hole for the towing eye and round over that end. This is shown in the photo below.

At the bottom is the original straight out of the packet and above is a worked toothpick glued to a trailer    box. This same design is used for all trailers and guns.   

 DRAWING PINS/WHEELS.                                                                                                                            

I use the same drawing pins for all wheels. They are purchased in Poundland in boxes of 400. Good value for money !!!!! As all my vehicles are 15mm in width and the pins are 9mm long you will realise that when gluing them on either side of a vehicle the actual points overlap. That is a problem as the shaft/pole is glued down the centre of the vehicle body. Therefore to avoid any unevenness caused by overlapping I cut the end off each pin.                                                                                                                                           

This is clearly shown in the above photo. It is a very dull task to snip the ends off  pins every time I build a batch of vehicles so I tend to do a complete box of 400 at a time so that I have a stockpile. Its still dull but at least I can choose when to inflict this miserable task on myself.

If you visit this blog, please leave a comment, good, bad or otherwise I would very much like to hear from you, anonymously if you prefer..
I have now been working on this blog for about two months. To date I have not had any comments at all on the various articles. I have assumed that is because no one has actually found or read the blog. That has not much of a concern to me as writing the blog is more for me than anyone else. I had the wild idea there might be another screw soldier fan out there somewhere but maybe not.
However today I find that there have been a number of visitors from both the UK and several other countries !!!!!!! Just because it says No Comment in the comment area does not mean don't comment, rather there are no comments yet !!!! So if you do visit my blog please leave a message, even if you think I am crazy, its all interesting to me.