David Drage

French Army

Hello everyone. This is my little report from my latest project, painting 6mm miniatures.

It all started on 17th of June when I took my usual visit at theminiaturespage.com and to my surprise saw an add from Peter Berry of Baccus 6mm ltd. The add told about “the great army give away”. The first 20 people that mailed Peter berry would receive a small army of his 6mm war of the Spanish succession for free. All you had to do was to paint them up and write a report how you thought about painting 6mm.

This was too great an opportunity to let pass as I already play a game called Gå På that covers this period. I had already painted up a Danish and a Swedish army in 15mm using Minifigs. I had been thinking about trying to paint some 6mm but had never actually got to the point to order some miniatures. This mainly due to the fact that I and my gaming friends have the 15mm range readily available through our local games shop. Not to mention the big step from painting 28mm and 15mm miniatures to painting 6mm. 6mm miniatures are small… No doubt about it. But small miniatures also have one advantage… They look great on the table when painted up into massive armies in a way that 28mm cannot match and hardly even 15mm.

To explain a little about myself. I have been gaming miniature wargames for almost 16-17 years now. As so many I was introduced into the hobby by Games Workshops Warhammer games and started to paint 28mm miniatures. I have now painted such vast hordes of 28mm miniatures, both fantasy, science fiction and historical that I consider my self quite proficient painting at that scale. My introduction into 15mm came 7-8 years ago when I started playing DBA and DBM. With DBA and DBM my interest went into historical miniature wargames and I painted up three DBM armies and a few DBA armies in a short time. In my opinion, I have never gained the same proficiency painting 15mm as painting 28mm but the sheer sight of a painted 400 points 15mm Roman army upweights that. Then, a few years ago I met Thomas Åhrnfeldt, the author of the Gå På rules covering the war of the Spanish succession and the great northern war at a gaming convention here in Sweden. Thomas was demonstrating the rule concepts he had developed and that would later become the Gå På rules. I took part in that demonstration game and got hooked by the rules mechanism that values moral and troop quality over such abstract values as firepower and such. I then painted up a Swedish and a Danish army for Gå På in 15mm. As time has passed, me and my friends has been talking about diverging into the continental war of the Spanish succession and the possibility of using 6mm for that project but it never got further than talk.

Then came Peter Berrys offer of the “the great army give away”. So this was an opportunity I could not miss. So I mailed Peter Berry and to my joy I soon after received a mail telling me that I was one of the lucky twenty.

A week later I received a small bag from Baccus 6mm containing a small army of French infantry and cavalry of the war of the spanish succession. I choose the French because I believe that the French got a little unwarranted bad reputation in that war. If the Duke of Marlboroughs victories would have been such overwhelming victories that they often are described as, then I guess the French would not have got away as cheap as they did when the war ended and peace was signed. It has now become my mission to prove that Marlborough can be defeated on the grim battlefield of the tabletop.

This is how the contents of the pack looked when I first opened it. I was quite amazed at the level of detail at the scale. I had seen microarmour miniatures before and they are not even close as detailed as these. But still… They are small… A lot smaller than the miniatures that I’m used to paint and even if they are detailed for the scale they still are not as detailed as larger miniatures. This would prove a challenge I thought.

The first step was to clean the miniatures and glue them to thin strips of plasticard. This is a trick I have learned from painting 15mm miniatures and allows for a god grip when painting the miniatures at the same time allowing for some speed painting. All miniatures glued onto plasticard strips and undercoated look like this.

I always undercoat in black nowadays as it allows for quicker painting and is perfect for blacklining as all you have to do is to leave that little black line between the colours.

From here it was just to bring forward the brushes and colours. I mainly use Vallejo colours with a few Citadel colours as I have not have had time to replace them yet. The brush I used was a size 0 synthetic brush and I took care that it was fairly new and good.

I started painting the gun barrels with metal. I then proceeded to the coat. I painted the coat with ghost grey. The French is supposed to have had a coat of an off-white light-grey colour and ghost-grey matches that well in my opinion. When I painted each strip of miniatures I painted one side at the time, front-side and back-side. This way I could maintain a fairly good speed. With the coat finished I proceeded to the facings. These should be red on the regiments I had choosen so I painted the facings with gory red. The next step was to paint the skin-colour. For the skin I used Citadel bronze flesh as I did not yet have Vallejos equivalent. With faces and hands painted I could now see some progress. The scarf was painted with bonewhite. I usually paint white areas bonewhite as I do not like the shining look that you get when you paint with skullwhite. The exception in this case was the linings on the hats that needed to light up and contrast the otherwise very black hats. The last step was to paint the hair on the miniatures and the few details on the command miniatures not yet painted. With this the first strip was finished and it had only taken me about one hour to finish. I chose not to Ink or highlight the miniatures as I believe that would only unfocus the colours at this small scale. Here is the finished strip...

And here is a close up

I was quite pleased with the result. It had gone better and faster than anticipated. But I had yet to base them before I could view any end result. And before that I had to paint the cavalry.

I choose to paint the horses in a dark brown colour and the riders in the same colour scheme as the infantry with the exception of the lining on the hats that was painted plague brown. When painting something yellow I usually use plague brown instead for the same reason that I use bonewhite instead of skullwhite. plaguebrown is a colour that is a little darker yellow colour with a tint of brown. I prefer this colour instead of most yellow colours because those often makes the miniatures shine up like something you mostly expect to find in the candy store.

With the cavalry painted it was time to base the miniatures. Peter Berry prepared the pack to be sufficient for a 100 points DBR army. As I do not play DBR I decided to base the miniatures according to the Gå På rules and then also according to the alternative basing suggested on Thomas web-page for Gå På. This basing requires that the infantry miniatures are based on bases 30mm wide and 20mm deep where 3 such bases make a battalion. As the miniatures comes on stripes 20mm wide I had to cut half of them into two. I also wanted the miniatures based in two ranks to get that more “massive” look. With a little work I had based one battalion, painted the bases and flocked them. Here is the end result with the flag also added.

The cavalry are based on bases 30mm square. Here I pondered a while on how many miniatures I could fit onto the base. In the end I opted for four miniatures wide in two ranks on each base. With the base painted and flocked the end result looked like this

Here the cavalry is riding into the attack in column and below in line.

To conclude my experience painting these miniatures I was surprised how fast and “easy” they were to paint and in the end how good they looked when based en masse. I guess that’s the strength of the 6mm scale. The sight on the tabletop of massive ranks of miniatures. The miniatures were also surprisingly a lot more detailed than I had first expected.

I will very probably expand upon this French army as I would very much like to se how a 600 points army would look like on the tabletop. I just have to solve those small little problems with getting loose the money and the time among all those all too many other projects I have running and tend to start. J