ACW Part 2 - Blocking and washing is the law

03 May 2022

After this, I estimate we will be will about halfway through and as you can see my minimalist approach to painting anything is beginning to bear fruit. I have added the flesh, the brown to the weapons and flagpoles with the gunmetal and I have followed this up with a wash of black nuln oil. I like to blackwash at this point as it gives me a guide as to where to paint the next level of detail.

Anyway, the Confederate Infantry are coming out well, and I can clearly see where to paint in the details. The drum especially looks good, and the officer's arm braiding is showing well too as you can see that I need to paint this with the shading in mind and the unit itself is looking good and is coming together nicely.

The Union unit is much darker with its dark blues, meaning that the shading is quite difficult to see in the photograph. However, it is there. But the flesh is showing up well as is the browns on the weapons and flagpoles.

This is the same for the union cavalry bases however, the shading on the horses will help out a lot, especially around the horse equipment and darkening the brown undercoat overall.

The confederates below still look better, the overall uniform is lighter, so the detail of the shading shows up better. All in all, these will, I think, look great on the table when being used in the heat of battle as I have said my minimalist approach to painting has worked. These four bases have taken me about 1.5 hours to do so far, and I think that’s about halfway through. I may have to eat my words of course as we know detail painting can run away with you, especially if you are not disciplined with it and stop when you need to stop.

At the end of the day, I am continuing to enjoy this process and that’s the important part. I am thinking that less is more for an ACW paint job and again these figures are proving even easier than I thought to paint. In Part 3 details and tidying up comes next before applying a final Nut Brown wash.