Force on Force - 20mm British Army

Morning all!  Now, for yet another exciting side project to keep me distracted.  A fellow wargamer sent a large cardboard box of powdered mashed potato my way a few weeks back.  Great!  When I opened it up, however, it turned out that it was just a fistful of 20mm British Army figures, itching to have a game of Force on Force.

Even better!

I'm painting them up for him, about 30-odd Brits and 30-odd Taliban, along with a few vehicles.  I thought I'd share a bit of my progress, along with a few thoughts about how hard painting in a new scale is.

I wouldn't say it was hard in the difficult sense ... I'm a born-and-bred, dyed-in-the-wool 28mm painter.  In fact, I've already painted quite a few of Empress Miniatures' British, so of course I just tried to use the same techniques for these chaps.  Of course, it didn't work.  They looked great, but after spending 10 minutes painting the camo dots on their shirts I was starting to go mad.  It took another half an hour before I realised that some gentle 'stippling' with an old brush had exactly the same effect as painting on random camouflage patterns, and took a fraction of the time.  

So it did take some time to adjust my ambitions a bit and snuggle down to 20mm ... but once I did things moved very quickly.  I took these in to work on a night shift and all were undercoated, basecoated, painted, washed, highlighted and based by 1am.  Perfect!  The vehicles took a bit longer, they required a considerable amount of weathering and some hefty powders but the effect is very nice I think.

As for how it was done, well this is my 28mm tutorial.  For 20mm, do exactly the same except as mentioned above, you can stipple the camouflage on lightly rather than laboriously painting on every colour.  

I should perhaps mention that I won't review the model quality as I don't know what make they are (I believe they came in bulk, second hand off eBay), but they were fairly accurate in terms of equipment.  Perhaps slightly dated, with the old-type handguards for the SA-80, and SUSATs with lots of belt kit as opposed to Osprey pouches.  But that's not really fair - kit and equipment changes so often in a real theatre (Google 'British troops Afghanistan 2006' and then '... 2012') that it's impossible to try and keep pace.  And these are detailed sculpts that no-one will notice the difference; they have all the detail there and are really easy to paint as well.

Anyway, thanks for reading.  Stay frosty troops ... hopefully there will be a new Battle Report up on/just after the weekend!

The Colonel