I've been working on 15mm American Civil War figures on and off , and a couple months ago broke open two of the old large packs (100+ figs each) of Old Glory, Union Marching and Union Skirmishing. I popped them onto about 34 popsicle sticks, (six to seven on average per stick), primed them up (using some black but mainly a brown primer), and got to assembly line painting... Somewhere, I could have sworn someone said painting 15mm was easier than 28mm... I hope to find that person one day and kick them right in the chach-bag... yes, there is less to paint, but it's all a lot smaller and doesn't lack for detail, ie. multiple bags, bedrolls (both grayish and light brown), belts, buckles, skin, straps (black and off-white), guns, bayonet frogs, canteens (blue and grayish), mustaches and beards, hat brims, shoes, socks, and all the other small stuff like buttons... It's a lot but the devil is in the details sometimes.
I started out with pants... painted all 214 figures, then started over and did all jackets and hats, then start over and do all the next item, star over and do all the next item... and so on and so on and so on... In a two or three hour window I might get six sticks worth of figs done... so night after night after night this went on for several months (the date of one pics showed June 3 this year, so it appears I started sometime in May. I could paint faster, but I do like to try to paint to a higher standard than simple gaming table figs. No I'm not OCD.... well maybe a little... I read a blog at macpheesminiaturemen.blogspot.com where he has some great tips and tutorial stuff... great painter too... but he wrote in once article about maximizing your work process... that's very helpful. Next time I think I'll just do one bag at a time though.
Well as of last night I finished up this lot, getting the majority of the figs based four to a 1" square, using 40 squares. One night to glue figs on, one night to paint the base dark brown, and last night getting all 40 bases flocked with grass and a few rocks. I'm really happy with the way they turned out.
I've got about 40 loose figures left, as I ran out of 1" bases and waiting for a new order to come in... and I need to do some command stands with Officers, flag bearers, and maybe some drummers. I intermixed the marching figs with the skirmishing figs to give a lot of variety, and tried to be careful not to make any bases look too much like any other.
I've got a number of large quantity bags of Confederate soldiers, artillery, more cavalry, and additional bags of Union infantry (Berdans Sharp Shooters and Iron Brigade), and more Artillery and cavalry. I didn't realize the artillery was going to go quite as far as it did... I might have to sell a bag and use the money to finance some other figure purchases... OR... I could paint them up and sell the painted sets for a nice little profit... to offset costs you say? NO!!... to buy more figures of course.
Here are some pics of this endeavor...
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