New to 6mm....need painting tips

[acctingman69]

Just wondering if I could get some painting tips?
I've painted a few 15mm stuff, but nothing this small.

I do not have access to an airbrush, but I was wondering if hand brushing on a watered down base coat is the way to go?

Also, any tips on painting infantry? There so small I highly doubt it matters much.

Thanks for any help.

[BattlerBritain]

Hi and welcome to GHQ

We hope you'll get to love the figures.

For painting AFVs I've come to use a simple wash mechanism of:
paint the whole vehicle in the main base colour, eg Soviet green
paint the tracks dark brown (Humbrol 173)
apply a black wash (I use GW Nuln oil)
go back over the large flat exposed areas with the base colour
paint in any details
Dry brush mud over the vehicle, heavy on lower half (Humbrol 118).

For camouflaged vehicles the wash doesn't tend to show as much but experiment to see what suits.

For infantry a similar mechanism but it depends on how much detail you want to paint on.
Try a few and see how you get on.

Hope this helps,

B

[chrisswim]

Welcome,
First you will find people on here that are helpful, knowledgeable and skilled. I am in awe of many and what they have done/accomplished.

I spray paint with Model Masters as my color and/or as the base. I hand brush other colors if multi-color camouflage. Hand brush tires and vision ports.

A thread to look through is the top one... Sticky: Show Us Your Stuff. If you see something in all those pages, copy info down and post on here asking what, how they did that.
Keeping asking questions. Welcome.

[Mk 1]

Hi acctingman. Welcome to the Forum.

So you say you want some tips? OK. you asked for it.

From my own experience, here is how I approach painting at this scale...


One thing you may want to do is collect a few of the tools that may be specific to / more appropriate to this scale.

I assume you have paints and brushes already. I have never used an airbrush, so for me if it doesn't spray from a can, I have to brush it on.

I have found that holding the models at this scale is a unique and substantial challenge. At least it used to be, for me. So now I don't hold them anymore. I super-glue them to the head of a nail. I then hold the nail when I'm painting an individual model, and I have a place to put up to 15 nails when I'm painting a batch. My "place" to put them is a styrofoam board. Easy-peasy, just stick nails in styrofoam. But some folks do a wooden board with drilled holes. Whatever. Really makes it easy to hold the little buggers. If I'm painting turrets separately, they too go on nail heads. Infantry get glued down onto popsicle sticks (actually stirring sticks from too many trips to my local Starbucks).

Then I suggest a magnifier. In my pic I show a contraption that has a magnification glass and multi-articulated object holders ("alligator" clips). Eh ... not such a fan. Looked good when I bought it, but for me far more useful is a desktop magnifier lamp. Not too hard to find. A big glass with a round bulb. They work well because: 1) you often need the light, and 2) a bigger glass has a deeper field of focus so the object doesn't have to be at exactly the right place to be in focus.

And I find tweezers to be a very important tool. I have some flat-head tweezers that are just brilliantly useful. But almost any good quality tweezers will be valuable.

I prime with while automotive spray primer. I prefer white because it lightens the base colors a bit and does a bit of highlighting for me (lightening the raised surfaces more than the rest). Does take some attention not to leave any surface unpainted, though. I assure you anything left WHITE will be seen.

I often use spray enamels as my base coat. I too like Testor's Model Masters sprays.

Most of the rest of my work is done with acrylics.

I do dark washing and dry-brushing of all my models. I very much like the effect. If you have experience painting at larger scales these techniques will probably not be new for you. I find that at larger scales painters may apply them more sparingly. I am rather "wholesale" in my approach.

For washing I now use a very dark brown acrylic thinned about 10-to-1 with water, with just the smallest touch of dishsoap added to break the surface tension. Blob it on the whole vehicle. It's kind of scary. You have painted it up all nice, and then you reduce it to an almost black blob? When just as I'm loosing my nerve I wick all the wash off by aggressively mashing it with an old paintbrush. Then I dry-brush with a lighted color similar to the basecoat. And all looks beautiful!

I tend to do a fair bit of detailing. I like to add a bit of character to my units.

I tend to do a second wash of the wheels / running gear after tracks and/or tires have been painted. This one is rust color diluted to about 5-to-1. This is not as aggressively wicked off, and leaves all that detailing of the running gear somewhat dirty looking. As it should.

I don't do decals. I think they look nice, but as I spent years developing my skills in detailing before decals became available at this scale, I figure why learn the skill of managing small decals too. That said, they do look nice.

I base my infantry on US Pennies. They are very robust. They are cheap (I can get 100 for $1 !), and readily available (just look under the sofa cushions). I use acrylic gel medium, tinted to earth tones, on the pennies. This is thick enough that I can put the infantry right into it and loose sight of the base molded onto the figures, and provides both the earth color and adhesion on the penny.

Here are a couple pics just for fun:


Consider this first pic the "before and after" reference to how I paint my models. Left and right are old GHQ IS-2s that I bought and painted many years ago. Spray from a can, and paint up tracks and guns, and that's about it. In the middle is a newer GHQ IS-2 that I bought and painted up using the techniques I developed based on all I learned here on this forum. I rather like that look.


GHQ Romanian Infantry painted to represent French Armee d'Afrique infantry.


Romanian R-2 tanks (also known as German Pz35t). I find that a tank with nothing but a base coat can still be an interesting model with a bit of detailing, washing and dry brushing.


I use the same techniques with heavily camo'd vehicles as well. Here are French H39s.


Italian Sahariana desert patrol, with "artillery crew" figures added as crewmen.

Open topped vehicles get crewmen (whenever I have the time). I REALLY like the way this makes models look.


I think it really pays off at game time. I have a mix of models painted to my old levels, and painted at (or refurb'd up to) my current levels. When I use the models at the newer levels I feel an extra jolt of enjoyment each time I move a model. It's just more engaging for my imagination. Makes the game more fun for me.

Hope that helps.

[acctingman69]

Thank you Mk1

[acctingman69]

Mk1

What rules do you use for your WW2 gaming?

[nashorn88]

Mk1 that’s a great write up!

[Mk 1]

What rules do you use for your WW2 gaming?

Well in part that depends on who I'm playing with.

My own preference is for 1-to-1 unit scales. That is, I want one model to represent one vehicle. One truck model is one truck, one tank model is one tank. Not one tank model is a platoon, or 3, or 5, or anything else. It's not that I object to 1-to-many unit scales ... I think they make a lot of sense game-wise, and the games often play very well at that level. But for me, miniatures is all about tickling my imagination. 1-to-many just doesn't do that like 1-to-1 does.

Over the past 15 years or so my games have used mostly two rulesets. But I will also give mention to a third.

The two I have played most often are Jadgpanther (v2), and Mein Panzer (also v2). I was involved in beta testing on both of the now current v2 versions.

My preference is for Mein Panzer. These are the rules I like best. Any game I put together is likely to use these rules. They do several things "right" to my tastes:
1) They balance armor and infantry at compatible levels of abstraction.
2) They are fast-play enough for battalion-sized forces on the table.
3) The turn structure keeps everyone engaged and playing all the time.
4) The turn structure makes your force org structure an integral part of the game structure.

Here's a bit more of what I mean:

1) I've played too many games where the tanks run around a bit shooting each other up, then some trucks get into town or into the woods and drop off their infantry AND THE GAME GRINDS TO A STOP WITHIN 2 TURNS. Why? Because a company of T-34s is 10 models, but a company of Motor Riflemen is 43 stands, and they all have to move, take morale tests, do siting, be in command control, be motivated/activated, shoot, do save throws, have rashes and trenchfoot, whatever else, while half the players have wandered off to find some snacks, some beer, or the exit.

Mein Panzer v2 has squad -based infantry (vs. fire-team or half-squad based). A platoon is typically 3 or 4 stands, and a company maybe 15 to 17 stands. Not too different from a tank company. And the combat is as fast-play as the tank action. It's not that either the armored action or the infantry action (or the infantry-vs-armor action) has the perfect mechanics, it's just that they are pretty well balanced to each other, so combined arms action is quite playable. I like that.

2) I have learned from my experience that games seem to flow best when each gamer has somewhere between 15 to 25 pieces. More than that, and even if the rules are fast-play, the measuring and pushing gets wearisome. At 1-to-1 unit scales that means about one company with some attached support per player. I like to gather up a few gamers, and with this build up a battalion-sized game. That's about the smallest size, in WW2, for a battle to actually involve some maneuver. Yeah I still do manno-a-manno games, and make the tables big enough for maneuvering, but with 5 or 6 guys the game experience is just so much richer. The Mein Panzer rules scale up to many players very gracefully. One player per side, or 3 players per side, or 1 vs. 3 ... it all works smoothly. Not a lot of rules manage that.

3) The turns are based on "activations". Every player generally gets to activate one unit per activation. The units are generally platoons. If you run a reinforced company you will usually have maybe 4 to 6 units. That means 4 to 6 activations per turn. Having the turn sliced up into 4 to 6 pieces means no one is sitting around for 20 or 30 minutes waiting for the other guys to do something. Everyone plays, all the time. Good!

4) The activations means you play your org chart, rather than having it as some sort of overlay. You work the platoons, you manage by platoons, you make your plans by platoons, but you see (and play) the action by individual squads and tanks. I like that.


Now I have also played Jagdpanther almost as much as Mein Panzer. It has been the preferred ruleset of others in my area that I have gamed with. The tank combat mechanism is a bit more complicated, but the turn sequence is simpler. It uses more basic I-go-U-go kind of stuff, but with added layers of shooting. Basically you move, I shoot, you shoot, then I move, you shoot, I shoot. There is no activation kind of thing, it's either all my turn (but you will get to shoot), or all your turn (but I will get to shoot).

I don't know the infantry rules as well. The guys who have put on the games have mostly relegated infantry to a supporting role (I get two battalions of T-34s and one company of tank riders ... OK guess how much attention I'll put on the infantry?). With Mein Panzer my games have often been more balanced, or even dominated by infantry on some occasions.

All of that said, the games play pretty well, and I've had several good ones. So the rules pass all my acceptability criteria, even if they don't rise to the level of my first choice.

Honorable mention also goes the third set I alluded to above. Panzer War is a very interesting ruleset. They have more detail, less abstraction, for the tank action. Armor is stipulated at every aspect. You get to see and feel the difference between a Pz IIIj and an Pz IIIm. That's very cool, particularly if you are a hard-core treadhead. And the rules are pretty elegant in how they handle the detail. But still I have not been able to make the rules work for smooth running game with a battalion per side among 5 or 6 guys. It's just too much detail. You need to be thinking of 5 - 10 tanks per player, not 15 - 25. And with all that detail on the armor, the infantry rules are relatively basic -- not bad, mind you, but not rich in details like the armor.

Still, given the price the rules are worth the investment even just as a reference on WW2 tanks, as the research is superb, and it has gun/ammo performance and every armor facing of almost every tank you can think of. Top class stuff.

So that's my thinking. Your tankage may vary.

[acctingman69]

I'm interested in mein pander and jagdpanther. Do you feel either rule set can be played solo?

As for a rule set more complicated, I'm looking at GMT`s Panzer

[BurtWolf]

I’d be curious too about Mein Panzers suitability for solo play? Good question, can someone weigh in? Thanks.