Bunker Hill sailors as promised

19 September 2025

This is one of the ships that I built from scratch for the Bunker Hill game.  As you can see, it is bereft of the little fellers that it needs to crew the ship.

Well here they are in the raw and ready for painting. Officers in this period were mainly clothed in blue and white, with black hats and shoes. Their uniforms were to be worn at all time while on deck, this dress had recently been standardised across the Navy.

The crew on the other hand was a different matter as uniform standards did not exist in the regulations. However, captains could recommend types of uniforms and most crew by this time would be wearing blue coats or jackets like the officers and lots of white, grey, red and brown shirts. Trousers would be mostly white or grey with black hats, shoes and neckerchiefs. I will also try to colour match the figure bases to the ships decking colour.

First up to paint we have the officers and deck crew. I have not included any marines, they are famously ashore and helping with the assault on Breeds Hill in the main battle.

And here below we have the gun crews, they are going to be manning only one side of the ships. This is because that side will be the side of the ship facing the battle.

Clever eh! Not having to paint any marines at all, then only doing half of the gun crew which means much less painting to do…

I decided to undercoat the crew with a white undercoat. This will of course help with the painting later with trousers, shirts and some of the details being white. There will also be some reds browns and grey details later, this will help to show some personalisation of crew from ship to ship.

As usual I then apply my favourite blackwash, Nuln Oil, as shown below. At this stage it is simply to show the figure detail and help with painting in those details at a later stage.

Now we are ready to begin adding in the block colours. I have used blue for most of the crew jackets with a sprinkling of brown jackets to mix it up a bit.

Have started to add the details starting with darker brown for the hair, wooden tools and some of the crew’s trousers. This is followed by black for the hats, shoes, telescopes and cannon balls.

Steel, Flesh, Bases and final touches are done for these guys below, we can now move on to the removal of them from their lolly sticks. Last time I got wounded for my efforts so I am going to be doubly careful this time.

Once they are removed, we can then we begin gluing them onto the ships. That will be my next Blog post.