Wednesday 20 January 2010

Napoleonics - Peninsular basing




Hi,

After a few solo games of DBN I'm convinced they're the Napoleonic rule set of choice for me; smallish armies mean I won't get bogged down, and ultimately lose interest in, large painting projects, and it means I can, in a relatively short space of time, put together armies for the 2 campaigns that interest me most; the Peninsula and Napoleon's ill-fated invasion of Russia.

Having finally settled on a ruleset I've started re-basing my 15mm Napoleonics for use with DBN rules; all of the elements are on a 40mm frontage, with the majority of the infantry on 20mm deep bases.

My usual basing colour scheme of black/graveyard earth/bone wouldn't really work for the more arid Spanish peninsula, so I needed to find some colours that worked. A recent Wargames Illustrated (#263) focused on Desert warfare and contained a feature on desert basing colour schemes. They suggested 4 colour palettes none of which was specifically designed with Spain in mind, so I just went with the one that I found most aesthetically appealing. I ordered the relevant colours from Maelstrom Games here in the UK (decent prices and free P&P) and started gluing figures to bases..

The paints arrived and, as usual, I decided to finish one base completely to make sure it was the effect I wanted.

I covered the base with PVA glue, dipped it into a box of sand and set it aside to dry. I started off by painting it black, followed by a heavy drybrush of Vallejo's English uniform (921), when this wa sdry a lighter drybrush of Vallejo Green Ochre was applied (914), with a final drybrush of Vallejo Dark Sand (847) to finish off. Once this was dry I glued on some small patches of GF9 parched Straw static grass, and a couple of clumps of GF9 Spring Undergrowth flock. Finally I glued on a small piece of olive coloured shrubbery (from a big bag of Woodland scenics foliage I think)

I'm quite pleased with the effect and will use this colour scheme to produce some matching terrain..

Best regards
Bob Mcleish






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