This column is indirectly being written by request. In the past year I have painted world war two figures for three other gamers, and turned down (for lack of time) requests to paint figures for several other gamers, and written out my painting techniques for two other gamers... and it finally occurred to me that there might be some interest out there in painting figures for the twentieth century! (Duh!)

There are two things that make the last 100 years different for the military miniature painter: ( I ) In previous centuries, men dressed to kill by being Impressive and Visible: bright colors so your own side knew who you were, and distinctive costume (bearskins, plumes, heraldry) so the enemy knew who you were and (hopefully) ran away. Once the long range rifle, high explosive shell, and the machine gun arrived. to be Visible was to be Dead, which Is not very Impressive. Military costume became as dull and undistinctive as possible - and much less fun to paint. (2) In previous centuries. the primary objects on the battlefield were Men and Animals (mainly horses, but occasionally exotics like camels, oxen, elephants, dogs, sheep, cattle, bees, etc). Machines, mainly in the form of artillery, was much in the minority and, despite all the efforts of the ironmongers, usually much less interesting than, all those colorful people (see 1. above). In the twentieth century, the battlefield came to be dominated, visually at least, by machines. Tanks, big guns, armored carriers, etc. sometimes painted in striking variations of camouflage and decorated with modem heraldry (unit insignia, vehicle identifications, slogans, even cartoons) were the apparent successors in color and interest to the uniforms of previous centuries.

As a result, modelers and painters have tended to concentrate on the machinery of world war two and the troops of everything before 1900. Today, with 15mm twentieth century figures proliferating almost monthly (as of March 1997,1 counted no less than six manufacturers of 15mm WWII figures on three continents), 20mm figures as abundant as ever, and 25mm world war two figures now being manufactured by at least three different companies, the troops cannot be ignored any more. The trick is, how to make the muddy grunt as interesting and visually-inspiring as the hussar of 1812 or the Tiger of 1944?

First, a quick general note on miniature gaming painting. The gaming world does not paint realistically. Period. Look at a person about 50 feet away. That is about the same size as a 20mm figure held close. At best, you can see a shadow where the eyes are, arid maybe some large folds in a bright cloth, but that's about all! A realistically painted figure would be, bluntly, pretty darned dull. Consequently, we paint as a cartoonist does. We exaggerate details, contrasts, and features, to emphasize the figure's recognition features - and, incidentally, the quality of the casting and our skill at bringing it out. Whenever you are painting, keep in mind that on the table, exaggeration is all that will show up: realistic details disappear into space. Every figure you paint is a caricature - a cartoon.

As it happens, l stumbled into a set of techniques that provide the right amount of exaggeration and caricature without a great deal of skill and time. If you have both the skill and time, you can undoubtably do better, but these work very well for blind old buzzards with spastic, ham-like fingers like mine.

Here's how it goes:

1. Prime and undercoat the figure in white.

2. Paint all the flesh areas with a light flesh tone. Any commercial "flesh' will do, since all of them are too light as they are, anyway.

3. Paint the basic uniform color. For the ordinary German uniforms I actually use two different colors. The basic Feld- gray, or uniform gray-green is Floquil's Polly S Field Gray No. 500710. This, alas, has no been replaced with the Polly Scale German Uniform Gray No. 505298, which is a little "greener" than the original hue. Lay this on as a wash, either thinned with water or with and an acrylic extender like Liquitex or Golden (brands) "Acrylic Flo Release". These all have the effect of thinning the paint and making more of the white undercoat show through, increasing contrast. For late war German uniforms, l also use The As GS-204 Field Gray, which is actually a light gray-green (more green than gray). Washed on, this represents the "cheap" dyed uniform cloth that was typical from 1943 on, and in the uniform shirts (used on figures with the sleeves rolled up) throughout the war.

For Russians, I use and an acrylic ink, also marketed as -brilliant water colors'. The color is "Antelope Brown" - actually a light yellow-brown color. I've used mostly the Rowney's's brand acrylic ink, but the same color is also available in the P.H. Martin brand. Paint the entire uniform with the ink full strength, or slightly diluted with distilled water.

4. Paint any brown hair or rifle stocks with a medium brown - NOT dark brown. I also throw in a few blonds using a light yellow. - I haven't bothered with " exotics" like redheads for WWII!Russian helmets are a dull gray-green. Armory makes a "KV- I Green" (GS-235) which is actually a brown-green color which is very close. German helmets, no matter what the uniform color, were a very dark field gray, or covered with a camouflage cloth (see below for painting camouflage).

5. Now for the rest of the inks. I use the following acrylic inks to add contrast on all figures:

Burnt Umber	for all flesh area
Sepia	for all the brown areas

6. Acrylic inks have one major drawback: they dry veeeerrrry slowly. In fact, they will "bleed" through other colors weeks after they've been applied. However, you can both "fix" the inks and provide a delightful extra contrast to the figure with one step. Mix 4 - 6 drops of black with a bottle of Polly S or Polly Scale Clear Flat. Shake well. Paint the entire figure with this. Go over the inked areas first and separately, because this will "pull" some of the ink off the raised areas of the figure, and the blackened clear flat will add to the shadows in all the lower areas. If you aren't careful to clean offyour brush frequently and make certain the inked areas are covered and dry first, you may get inks "spilling" over onto the rest of the uniform. On the German field uniforms this "blackened clear flat" is particularly effective, since the thinned black is a perfect 'shade" for the field gray uniform colors and really "defines" all the detail.

7. After the acrylic blackened clear flat is thoroughly dry, I use "gun metal" color metallic enamel (Pactra or Testor's) for all the gun barrels, etc. The only other metallics I use are chrome silver for bayonets (for contrast) and dry-brushed brass for machine gun cartridges in the machine gun belts. Dry brush "steel" or "aluminum" over the dark gunmetal, to pick oust the detail on the guns.

8. Paint belts. Early war Germans had all black leather field gear, but later in the war a lot of the gear was canvas In the same field gray as the uniform. or even "raw" (light tan) leather. I mix 'em up a lot for variety. Canteens were all tan, brown, or red-brown, and ammo caris or mortar and machine gun parts being carried are either dark gray or the regular field gray. Russian belting could be red-brown leather for the of ricers, but most of the late-war field year was canvas webbing in the same shades as the uniform - hence the Antelope Brown over the whole uniform.

9. Paint all the black. in addition to shoes and jack boots and any black leather work, I also us. a fine brush to "touch up' any spots, like under the helmet rims, where I need to add shadows. Incidentally, the Russian boots were black leather, like the German. Where pictures show what appears to be brown boots on Soviet troops, they are either special dress boots worn by of fleers (brown boots were also issue for cavalry before the war), or cheap black dye that has worn off a boot in the field.

10. Finally, take a medium or dark gray and dry brush over the black areas. This allows the detail on creases in the boots or other leather to be seen - straight black is great for contrast with other colors, but it also hides detail within the black itself.

Among the other "details" you may or may not want to get into, I've done German officers with Insignia: paint a patch of silver on the collars, then put a stripe of black over it so the result is a collar patch in black outlined in silver - the same technique works for the sleeve bands used by some units like Gross Deutschland or AfrikaKorps veterans. Late war Russians with the pogony (shoulder boards) can also be identified as officers or leaders: paint the entire shoulder board bright red, then paint it olive-green (Troll green-brown works here, too) there is a thin red outline on the board. On the front of the collar of the tunic the Russians a wore a patch with rank/ branch color. It was supposed to be camouflaged, but a lot of them wore the "dress" branch colors into combat: red for infantry, black for the tank and motorized rifle troops. blue for cavalry, etc. Finally, I've got some Russians in the peaked caps (Old Glory Command Pack refugees) with the entire top of the cap painted medium green and the men wear medium blue trousers with a wide red stripe down the side: NKVD Border Troops, which p ed the Rear Area security - and shot troops trying to retreat early in the war!

SS and German Uniform Camouflage

Instead of the field gray on the uniforms, I use either a medium green (summer) or a light yellow (autumn-winter) for the SS camouflage smocks, both suitably thinned to washes. Then, over the entire camouflage area, paint a thinned wash of acrylic sepia ink, about 1: 1 water to ink. When most of this is removed by the clear net overcoat, it 'dulls" the green/yellow and gives a nice bunch of brown/gray shadows on the uniform. Add some patches of medium brown here and there, and then (the tedious part) take a fine brush and add fine dots of very dark brown (I use Polly S fantasy color: Ogre Dark Brown, which is almost black) all over the camouflage uniform. I recently tried a shortcut here, using a Staedtler waterproof STABILO marker in brown. which is and an alcohol-based overhead projector marker with a felt tip. This made the dots a lot faster, but it dries with a definite glossy sheen to it, so you have to give the tenure another coat of clear flat to kill that. Put contrasting dots over the brown or dark portions of the camouflage uniform with a very light yellow. To be accurate, you could end up with about 5 different colors on the uniform, but in 1 5mm it's mostly wasted - what we need is to show the general effect of the camouflage pattern from a distance, not the specific pattern itself.

You can use a similar technique to paint the camouflage covers on helmets used by both the regular German army and the SS, or the army ground cloths (shelter-halves) that were oc- casionally worn as parkas or smocks. My own feeling is that with the relatively dull WWII uniforms, anything you can do to legitimately add variety and color is worth doing!

For US troops, the same techniques apply. Paint the uniform in any of several shades of light, dull green. Use and an ink wash of sepia thinned as for the German camouflage. Sepia being basically a dark brown pigment. it will turn the green into a drab shade, very much like the US olive-drab. Note that US troops in world war two did wear brown foot gear, and US helmets were usually a darker shade of gray-green than the uniform. Since green pigments fade like crazy when they are exposed to weather, you can use a wide variety of light to medium greens for your basic uniform shade and still be correct. Also, the canvas Ebbing used for US straps and gear fades to almost white when it weathers or is washed, so day brush belts, pouches, etc with a very light green lightened with off-white or light gray.

I have not yet painted any Japanese or British figures, because this last year I've been mainly concentrating on Eastern Front collections. The same techniques should apply, how- ever: find a basic uniform color that is several shades lighter than what you want to end up with, and wash it with thinned ink. Sepia is a good basic "drab" wash, but raw sienna or Her red-brown shades can be mixed with it for a "browner" uniform like the Japanese. or the British, German or Italian desert uniforms.

Well, that's it for World War Two figures. There are a number of steps in each figure, but because most of them are using washes of paints or inks, it all goes pretty fast: I can usually average 7 - 10 minutes total painting time per 15mm WWII figure, by doing them In "batches" of 30 - 50 on painting sticks. That's better than twice as fast as I paint 18th century or Napoleonic figures, so for me World War Two is a real time-saver!

Vehicles

A black undercoat technique is likely to lead to some very dull vehicles. The exact vehicle colors are available in the extensive Floquil line of acrylics (folly S or Polly Scale) originally designed for the plastic modelers, but the exact colors are too durn dark! One of my friends (a very good plastic modeler and air brusher) panted a bunch of German late-war armor in the exact "dark panzer yellow" with green camouflage spray pattern, and the tanks are all much too dark on the table. Here's how to do "table top" German and Russian vehicles:

Prime using Floquil's gray primer, or any equivalent white or light colored primer. For early war Germans (up to early 1943), use a medium gray, then wash with the blackened clear flat and highlight with dry brushed off-white or dust (see below).

For the late-war "panzer yellow" vehicles, which is just about everything after early 1943, use German Light Tan (RLM 69, or Polly Scale No. 586312). This is several shades lighter than the dark Parizer Yellow, but in the same spectrum. Paint the entire model, except for tracks.

Mix sepia ink with Rowney's Olive Green No 363, or and an equivalent medium-light Been (the Rowney "olive" is actually a pretty straight light green). Mix about 1: 1 and thin alit the same amount of water. Paint the entire yellow vehicle. Now hit it with the blackened clear flat. Keep cleaning the brush a lot, because streaks show up much more on the larger flat armor surfaces than on figures. The result should be a very contrasting dull yellow-green tank with all the details "picked out" in darker shading. For the camouflage patterns, because the spray needs to be about 1/16" wide, and it takes a real airbrush artist to control that kind of precision spray. Rather than take up and an entire new hobby, I either leave the vehicles without camouflage pattern (which is really not that uncommon, It's just that most of the wartime photographs that are published show the patterns because they look bener) or use and an old brush and "stipple" on blotches of medium green and brown in and an irregular pattern. This Blotch pattern was common late in the war (mid- 1944+), but using it for 1943 is a bit of a stretch. The "ambush" or splinter pattern with the little white dots all over a mixed brown-green vehicle is really neat-looking, and impressive when done well, but it's almost completely unrealistic: the pattern was only applied from the end of 1944 on, so it's worthless unless you are doing scenarios from the last 5 months of the war! The pattern isn't even correct for the Ardennes Offensive in December 1944, because most of the panzers there were over washed with white snow camouflage!

For Russian tanks, use almost any dull medium green. The actual tanks were painted quite dark, but all greens are NOT color fast in sunlight - they lighten in the weather very fast. Wash the entire tank in blackened clear, then highlight with a very light green dry brushed on. Using "dust" or other light tan also makes a good highlight for tanks, and I liberally dry brush dust or mud all over the lower surfaces of all vehicles. I was a tanker for a couple of years, and nobody ever believes just how dirty them things gets In the field - you could almost get away with just painting everything below the turret "dirt" color regardless of nationality!

Tracks I paint all over red-brown - rust color. All the metal surfaces of a track get metal-on-metal wear, which removes all paint and protection so they rust like crazy.

After painting and the blackened overwash (which goes over the entire vehicle, includ- ing tracks), take "steel" colored enamel (I never have found any decent acrylic metallics) and dry brush the edges of the tracks and any raised portion of the track links - the worn metal is shiny wherever it actually gets rubbed against the ground or other metal. Also, I dry brush "bare metal" on other worn surfaces of the vehicle - anywhere crew would have stepped to get in, like the front fenders, hand rails, upper edges of the turret and around hatches, handles, access covers, and where hot exhaust removes paint, like over the engine or exhaust pipes.

The final step is to give the entire vehicle a light dry brush of dust-color, with emphasis on the lower hull, suspension and wheels, tracks, and the rear of the hull where the tracks will throw up mud and dirt as the vehicle moves.

I am still looking for a good source of decals or transfers for the German turret numbers in 15mm. I have some white number sets, but most of the late-war tanks seem to have used red with white outline, and that's just too much to hand-letter in 15mm I have done some handlettered Russian slogans, but most of those were sloppy enough that irregularities are less of a pain - the Germans used number stencils that are too neat to reproduce easily by hand. On the other hand, those of you using 20mm and larger models have a real treat: Microscale Decals out of California have a whole 4000 series of decal sheets which include 1/72 and 1/76 armor markings for German (Army, SS, and Luftwaffe vehicles), early and late-war US, British, Russian, and Polish vehicles. If you haven't found them already, see your local hobby shop immediately - excellent stuff.

Special stuff. I did a bunch of winter-camouflaged tanks for a February 1944 winter scenario. For neatly done vehicles. I just sprayed the entire assembled tank white, when painted the tracks red-brown, washed the whole thing with the blackened clear flat, then did a little mud dry brush over the suspension and lower hull. For more "sloppy" winter white wash, I first painted a bunch of Russian tanks medium green, then put streaks or blotches of white over that and then over washed with blackened clear and detailed. In all cases, dry- brush some black or very dark gray around the back deck and around the turret hatches - the white paint was frequently just water-based, and wore off very quickly where troops stepped on it - the "steel" or bare metal dry brush also works well here.

Well, I hope that gives you something to work with. The techniques were originally Raked out for Vernon figures, but I've also used them on 20mm with good results. For 25mm, of course, those with the skill will want to extend the details with the full face treatment: eyes, lips, eyebrows, etc., and all the other uniform details that are visible in the larger scale. The basic Light Shade - Ink Wash - Clear Blackened Flat technique will, however, still get the basic figure out of the way quickly, so you folks out there with the 5xO brushes and the 6xO eyes can go to town!