Inspired to paint plastic army men for miniature wargaming
Posted by oddBattler on April 14th, 2007I was inspired by the Miniature Gaming podcast and its sister page at Universeofbattle.com to try out the suggestions there to paint my own plastic army men miniatures for wargaming. I’ve just started with the primer portion of painting my plastic army men, trying to follow the instructions. I think this may be interesting because I have no experience with miniature wargame figures and certainly not painting them, and even though miniature waragame purists may find it apalling to call my little green army men “wargaming miniatures,” remember, I have to start somewhere. Give me time. Please.
I also want to say that I do not know the gentleman that created the pages above, but am thankful for them. I hope he will be please with how I have followed his lead. I’ve already made my first mistake, however. We’ll see what happens.
First are the army men themselves. While you can get plastic army men online at Amazon for a few dollars, I found a dollar store, where everything really was a dollar and they just happened to have army men. I bought them immediately…that and a piggy bank which I had been looking for (they’re hard to find!) So I paid one dollar, not counting the hawg bank.
As you can see from this picture my first mistake was to get the wrong color paint. Of all the easy things to do and almost foolproof point to follow, I got flat brown instead of flat black paint for my primer. I guess I’m going color blind because in Wal-Mart it looked like black to me. When I sprayed it on, my son said, “Hey, that looks brown.” Well, that’s because it is. Actually, it is the camouflage Krylon paint with “Fusion” to bond to plastic. What can I say? It was all they had and I wanted to paint. It looked black so I bought it. Here are the plastic army men pictures painted flat-brown (click the images to enlarge):
One thing I discovered was that you have to turn the plastic army man over to get underneath him. I know that sound silly to note, but I didn’t think about it until I saw him. Here’s my hot dog cooker coat hanger contraption to hold the drying miniatures:
I was able to find acrylic paint for flesh, hunter green, but not sandstone and dark brown opaque. I used colors that looked close. I also added a little. I tried to add as much detail as possible. One thing that I did was put inca metallic gold on the ammo belt of the machine gunner. The image is blurry to show the belt, not much depth of field here:
Both Finished with before and after:
Before and after single shot:
More close ups. See how we followed more of the original blog inspiration (thank you). We used Thyme, Oregano, and Tarragon leaves for the terrain the army men were standing or walking on. Tarragon leaves are the long leaves and you can see them up close here as a nice effect:
Another touch was using the spice on this model and not simply gluing the grass (spice) to the base of the little “military model,” but also augmenting the sculpting of the figure. Even though the figures are cheap, I wanted to get all I could out of them. Here in this picture you can see the sculpture simulates walking, motion. To make that seem real, instead of just dumping grass on the army man’s base, I carefully put some of the grass on his foot, as if he were really walking. You’ll also see his canteen is a lighter green and his belt brown. I mixed a little bit of the colors to get the green. I believe the brown was brown oxide, while the boots are licorice. We were also careful to put the flesh acrylic paint across the neck, underneath the helmet.:
Front side of the army man. I admit the eyes look funny, and I stopped and didn’t add chest hair:
For our first attempt at painting miniatures, it looks like we did okay. I’ve been to hobby stores and seen the paint jobs on Warhammer and other figures, and while our painted plastic army men don’t look like the front of a Flames of War box, they do look as good as some “homemade” paint jobs. Sure, we’ve got a long way to go, but it is fun to paint these miniature wargaming figures. I wish I were young enough to dedicate time to it (read I have kids now.) It’s quite relaxing, actually, to concentrate on the painting. The total cost of everything was about eight dollars and some change, but I had a few of the acrylic paints already (licorice and light green), along with the Elmer’s glue and paint brushes. In any case, here’s the miniatures studio:
We haven’t used them in play yet, but we’ll get there. Thanks again for the inspiring post on the blog and his podcast.
More plastic army men:
24pc Plastic Army Men Cold War Toy Playset ~ 54mm 1/35th Soldier Figures, Bunker, Artillery, Missile Trailer, Trucks & More!
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