I know some of you gamers who once did larger scale figures are - like me looking into the little 6mm guys now for that 'big battalions" look. The 6mm lines have a lot going for them: speed, ease of painting, mass, and cheapness. But still, there are those of you more artistically inclined gamers who look at the 6mm scale and sigh deeply because they don't seem suited to showing off your painting skills. For example, most painters settle for a blob of flesh-colored paint where a human face ought to be. What a travesty!
Painting faces on 6mm figures isn't nearly as hard as you'd think. Here is a quick and dirty guide that will greatly enhance the appearance of your armies:
I generally use a black primer, unless overwhelming areas of the figure will be white (such as Austrian infantry, for instance.) For the faces, a black primer gets a white semi-dry coat, and then once that's dry, I go ahead and use the basic flesh color. Next I apply a brown ink wash. That brings up details nicely, settles into things like furrows in the brows, razor stubble, and the like. Some gamers might settle for that and move on... well, not so fast!
Neglecting a figure's eyes is one of the cardinal sins of miniature wargaming. For my 6mm French, I start with a black oval in each eye socket. When that dries, I paint over it with white, but leave just a hairline of black around the edges as a natural blacklining. Before we move on to the pupils, we should understand that figures from the horse-and-musket era operated in an atmosphere of perpetual irritation to the eyes. Dust from marches and smoke from gunpowder were constantly making them miserable, and those were in the days before Visine. So I use a red ink wash over the white eyeballs, to give them that bleary and weary look, and then I go ahead and paint the little red veins in the corners before I do the pupils, because it's much easier to paint over if you've done too many veins. If your troops have just awakened, you could even give them those little dry crusts of mucous in the corners of their eyes; a few well-placed grains of normal sand works nicely.
Next the pupils. Choose eye-color carefully. German and other Nordic types will likely have more blue-eyed soldiers, whereas the French, Spanish, and Italians will probably have more browns. (For my 6mm Ottoman Turks I use a nice, rich chocolate color - almost black.) Eyelashes are a cinch; I use a few of my own. I pluck out one or two with my wife's tweezers, and then cut them into appropriate lengths using my 0.00000001 X-Acto knife. Regular epoxy should do the trick, but be sure that the glue has fully dried before you paint eyebrows, because you don't want to risk gunking up your brush.
Once the eyes are done, everything else just falls into place. You'll want to drybrush the nose, chin, and perhaps the forehead with a few light (very light!) strokes in linen or off-white. Just a touch, though! This lighter coloring gives these areas a raised effect, making them more prominent, instead of receding into the weather-beaten cracks of the soldier's face. Nostril hairs are easily daubed on with the same fine brush and black ink you'll use to make the gumline and the lines between the teeth. I always use black in the mouth first, and then paint teeth, gums, and tongue over them. Some painters say this makes the white teeth too "dirty" looking... but come on now, guys. We're talking about 18-19th century soldiers on the march. I doubt they did a lot of flossing, even in the British army.
Hopefully the original brown wash has done its job, and you won't need to do thin s like battle scars, shaving cuts, or chewing-tobacco stains (for your ACW Confederate armies). You will, of course, need to give them some razor stubble obviously in the same color as their hair. Figures representing older men (Generals, for instance) might have more "wild hairs" here and there. I understand that Marshal Soult had a huge crop of them in his ears... yech! Still, you need to paint them. We're simulators, after all, not just "gamers."
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© Copyright 2001 Hal Thinglum
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