Honi soit qui mal y pense - First five modern Royal Fusiliers finished.

Finally after a rathing disturbing weekend I want to come back to the more pleasant side of life: Our mutual hobby.

During the last months I've been preparing the modern theatre of war. There are a couple of manufacturers producing modern ranges and especially the ranges by Empress, Hasslefree and Spectre arose my attention. Thus after a first testpiece in August (article here) I used the last week to paint the first batch of modern British:

The miniatures are from Empress' Miniatures Modern Combar range and depict a couple of modern British soldiers with slightly different equipment. Namely most of them are carrying the standard British L85 assault rifle while one of them has an attached grenade launcher and one has an L129A1 designated marksman rifle. Additionally the boys are carrying a selection of backpacks: Either a tactical combat rucksack or a camelbak or no backpack at all. Altogether an interesting selection of stuff.

 

The figures come with loose heads and Empress is offering a couple of replacement heads for the figures. This way they can either wear the common British combat helmet or paratrooper berets or fusilier berets with hackles. As you see I decided to use the latter with a part of the chaps. On the one hand I think these headgear is simply looking excellent but on the other hand the history of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers has been fascinating me since I visited their regimental museum in the Tower of London some years ago.

The figures shall represent modern or near futures British soldiers for rather mmiddle-eastern theatres of war. Although my inspiration came from 'Operation Herrick' those chaps might serve in fictional conflicts as well. We'll see. Because of that I'm not planning to create a concrete force but more or less a platoon-sized troop for smaller games like Black Ops or maybe kind of modern Bolt Action.

Anyway because of their modern background I wanted my fusiliers to wear British multi-terrain pattern (MTP) battledress. But on the other hand I thought the whole miniature in that shape might be too busy. Thus those boys had to wear older khaki-coloured vests, boots and knee pads. In my opinion that gives them a nice but not too pushy coulour variation.

For the battledress I employed Vallejo Game Colour (VGC) 'Khaki' as base colour, whashed it to outline the folds and highlighted it with a drop of Vallejo Model Colour (VMC) 'Pale Sand'.

Afterwards I painted the MTP trying to get small, horizontal, irregular stripes and stains. Thus I used VMC 'Saddle Brown' and VMC 'Russian Uniform WW2' first then a mixture of VMC 'Black' and VMC 'Black Grey' because I was afraid that pure black might be too dominant. The last layer were small dots of VMC 'Pale Sand'.

As you see the bases aren't completely finished yet because I chose to take the pictures before varnishing the figures. Although I use matt varnish only I experience a rather satin-glossy finish from time to time. Therefore I prefer to take the first photos before any varnish influences the coulours.

It was really fun to paint those miniatures. The sculpts are wonderfully dynamic and full of character. Unfortunately I don't know who the sculptor of these figures is but their quality is in my humble opinion really top-notch. Just as good as the castings are. Empress is surely not the cheapest manufacturer out there but at least the castings of those chaps were nearly perfect. Only very few mold lines that were easy to remove.

For next week there are some jungle terrain pieces to finish and some Desert Rats to paint. But I'll rather soon return to this range and expand my forces.