Painting: His Majesty's Marines

A short break from Moderns and the Falklands project. 

I recently purchased some 28mm Pirates, 3 ships and a Pirate fort from TMP, it's been a project I've wanted to do for a long time. It's silly, potentially outrageous and a great distraction from the usual fare down at the club. Also, it's the perfect excuse to paint up some Horse and Musket era figures, which I've always wanted to do.

With a game organised over the Easter holidays, and these great miniatures having arrived from Black Scorpion Miniatures during the week, complete with a lazy Sunday recovering from a Friday night that involved far too much alcohol, painting miniatures by the numbers was the perfect cure. (Also, I'm taking a break from Mass Effect 3 in-order to make it last longer, and also to ensure I'll have something to play over Easter. =P) 

The miniatures are from the new batch of figures from Black Scorpion, which means they're cast from resin rather than metal, the casts are fairly clean, only one figure had a noticeable bad mold line down his breaches, also, as you can see, one of the marine's swords is quite jagged.

I did the miniature cleaning and undercoating the night before, having never worked with resin miniatures before, and assuming they'd be like plastic miniatures, I made the mistake of filing down a subborn blob of resin from one of the marine bayonets, with promptly snapped!

Realising the difference in properties between resin and plastic, I put my files away and basically just snipped off any obvious bits  of flash and just left it at that. 

With the majority of colours on the miniatures being red and white, I decided on using a grey primer by Tamiya for my undercoat.

The basecoat for the jacket was 'Black Red' by Vallejo, Vallejo 'Camo Black Brown' was used on the swords, muskets, pistols, hands and faces as well as the boots and hats.

The tunic was given a coat of 'Buff' after I couldn't find my bleach bone, all the white was 'Ivory' by Vallejo.

On top of all that, I added, Dark Flesh on the skin, Blood Red was on the jackets.

Here's a photo of them 'near completion: 

And here's a photo of them completed: I painted the bases black at around 11pm, but that's them in their completed state.