I’m starting work on 6mm naps, 1815 British specifically. I’d love to crowd source paint recipe ideas. Which paints do y’all use? Ideally Vallejo. While I’m pretty experienced with 6mm, I’m new to naps, and it’s taking a lot of trial and error to find the balance between the authentic color, and the right brightness to make 6mm pop. Any help would be much appreciated!

There are two schools of thought for painting 6mm ;

1) make everything brighter to make them pop because they are small.

2) tone down the colours to represent the fact that you are looking at units from a distance.

Personally I favour the second method. Black becomes very dark grey and white becomes very light grey. The only vivid colours I use are are on flags and unit markings.
 

For British I would undercost them Brown (musket, etc already painted!) then paint a light red.  I am not familiar with Vallejo but I use foundry triad light bright red 15C for anything red.

Hello zabarr!

I use the cheapest dollar store paint that you can find. Gave up on expensive paints years ago. You can usually find a reasonable colour choice to match whatever your painting.

A lot depends on how you plan to paint your figures, fast or masterpiece. If fast use a black undercoating and you can just slap the paint on. However, it also darkens the colours, white looks beige, etc. If you want the colours to pop undercoat them white. It's the only way you'll get reasonable whites, yellows, reds, etc.

The other important item if your serious about trying to get the figures to pop is avoid using small bases and try not to overcrowd the figures. More light in, more light out! You also want to use basing material that contrasts with the figures to some degree. I recently switched to a mid green grass with some mid brown earth tones for ground cover. It's amazing at how much better the figures look. Light coloured grass and light coloured earth tones matched the colour of my terrain mat, and the bases blended in nicely with the mat, but it kind of washed the colours out of the figures. Now both the base and the figures pop a little more. So you need some room on the base to get all of this working for you.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Glenn

Awesome, thanks for the tips everyone. Quick question, for the firmed Belgic Shako British infantry, what’s that on their lower back, immediately to the left and below the cartridge pouch? From the few pictures I can find of them from behind, it’s not a part of their coat and is painted black? Any advice would be much appreciated. 

Is it the canteen ?