Tools of the Trade 1

For the last 20-something years, I've effectively only gamed and painted 15mm (1;100th) WW2.  Sure I dabbled in Warhammer 40K occasionally, but those armies were very much vehicle heavy armies (Eldar, Tau) or creature types (Tyranids) and apart from the latter, the paint schemes were almost invariably modern camouflage schemes - notably Swedsh 4 colour schemes with white alternate panels.

As a result my current palette of paints is very limited in scope. My 15mm AWI/ACW/1859-1870 armies were either bought painted or were still bare metal. I've been using Vallejo paints since they first became available locally in the late 90s I think, as I found GW paints expensive and definitely not value for money.  Nor did they meet my requirements or suit my painting technique in 15mm and the 28mm stuff I did paint was mostly airbrushed using VMC anyway.

So I will need to purchase a fair few paints in order to expand the palette for the FIW project.  To that end, I'm grabbing three boxed sets of Vallejo (Colonial American, American Revolution and Native American colour sets) plus what I call my British and French supplemental colours. Thankfully the duplication across the 48 bottles is extremely minimal and the duplicates are core paints anyway such as Black, White and Buff. 

As far as basic tools go, I'm good for files, pin-vise and drill bits. I will need to buy some tweezers as the one pair I have is very much reserved for my boardgaming. I would hve liked to get the two Tamiya tweezers below but they're out of my allowable tools budget:

 Instead I've gone with the 75% cheaper option of the Army Painter ones here:

In regard to mediums, varnishes and retarders, I'm sorted in that respect as I still have all of those still, just in storage awaiting the right time to retrieve them.

Brushes are still a work in progress, a while back I was able to get a set of the Army Painter brushes for dirt cheap new in box, but never ended up using them, so they will get some use finally, until I can afford to invest in some more Roymac Purity Sables and Revolution synthetics - I do need multiples of the same brush because I'm going to be keepinmg separate brush sets for Reds, Whites and metallics. I still have nightmares of painting red markings on a mostly white Zero model airplane when I was younger - The Pink Zero was not a great memory.

A few more things for modelling and painting are going to be needed, but the most importatnt first purchase will be a portable painting/modelling area. More on that anon...

Pete