Tools of the Trade 3 - Brushes, Tufts and Paints (plus some other stuff)

Over the last few days my initial orders from Mighty Ape arrived:

- 4 x Italeri 00 sables
- 4 x Italeri 1 sables
- A bunch of Warlord FIW blister packs (Armed Settlers, Frontiersmen, British personalities, Last of the Mohicans, and the 4 Indian leader pack)
- 10 x Army Painter Tufts packs ( 2 each of Woodland, Swamp, Highland, Mountain, and Lowland Shrubs - all 2016 editions)
- Army Painter Tweezers



I have to admit I was swayed by the price and the handle shape - I'm not at the skill stage where I can justify spending oodles of $$$ on Winsor & Newton Series 7  but to be able to have separate brushes for metallics, reds and white at an affordable cost is huge for my peace of mind.

I picked up the Army Painter tufts that were on special (the 2016 ones that are not as consistent as the more recent editions) as I preferred the look of them to the newer ones. Thankfully I have enough tufts now to base all 450 miniatures and bases that this project will entail as I'll be mixing them up as much as possible - I already have several packs in storage that will get mixed in as well.

Yes, 450 figures. Originally I'd estimated around 360 figures for three forces. That went south as soon as I bought some Warlord FIW and also decided that I would be adding a few more civilian/settler types to expand the scenario types I wanted to model. Project creep is real.

I popped into a local games store just for a nosy and was very pleased to see they were now stocking the entire Vallejo Model Colour and Game Colour ranges - so I grabbed some core paints that I don't have including that most vital of Vallejo products - Surface Primer Grey. An absolute must when painting lighter coloured civilian figures as I will be doing over the next 2 months. I made sure I also grabbed a few different reds so I could experiment with the shade of the British red coats. I'll almost certainly favour the darker, deeper reds over the palette that moves towards the Napoleonic red.

And because Mighty Ape only had one set left and I wanted to try painting a formal unit anyway, I picked up a box of metal Colonial Provincial Regiment - which I'll end up having to buy a second box anyway to have multiples of 6 for Sharp Practice.

Still a couple of things awaiting arrival, notably leader bases, 25mm round bases and shock dice/frames and the storage options I'm taking a punt on just to see if they are worth a long term plan.


Pete

Tools of the Trade 2 - Selecting a Painting Station

Due to a change in personal circumstances, I no longer have the luxury of a dedicated area for my hobbies.For the most part, my hobby time is effectively restricted to 90-120 minutes in the evenings during the week or whenever the marauding three year old is otherwise occupied safely on weekends. Almost certainly this will be in the evenings as well.

My area of operations is effectively confined to the living room, so my set up must be portable, easily set up and broken down, and capable of being secured against the cats and the fore-mentioned two-legged Destructor.

So I'm going to need some kind of painting station set up that fits the above criteria and is within a modest budget of around $100-120 AUD. It will need to provide storage for all my tools, paints and basing materials while being capable of fitting within a 70L capacity plastic roll-away container.

Ideally, if my budget was not so constrained, I'd be able to go for the Frontier Gaming case although even then it does have that annoying issue of no self-contained integrated space for a cutting mat. 

I looked at the Army Painter paint station but it was a bit too basic for my needs and I've seen several issues raised regarding durability in other reviews that gave me pause.

In the end I went with a more expensive option: the Paint station from Miniature Scenery at $75 AUD including postage

There were a few points that sold me on this product:

1. Customisable at time of ordering. I could select different storage options and set ups for left and right sides to suit my needs.
2. An A4 sized cutting mat is included in the package
3. The inbuilt tablet/phone stand was a clincher - I will be using my iPad for reference purposes while painting and modelling, and having the phone close at hand offers me a separate option for other audio.

I originally was veering towards the option on the right which included a paint rack for a project sized selection of Vallejos. However I was recently also gifted some Vallejo paint racks (1 straight and two corner racks) as below:

This was an absolute boon, as I use 60ml and 200ml bottles a lot anyway. So I plumped for the paint station option that provided two media device stands and two storage drawers on the reverse. This also provides the option of two water pots and additional storage for tools.

There are a couple of additional storage options on the way with a view to the future but that can wait until next time.

The good thing is, I now have my painting set up on order and can concentrate on acquiring the first lot of miniatures and sorting out my basing options and theme for Sharp Practice.

Pete

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