Painting 10mm Great War British

In order to help keep me motivated to keep painting, I took a break recently from painting Civil War miniatures to work on something else for a while. That last thing I really need is another project, but I figured working on something different for a while would keep me painting and also make it a refreshing change when I go back to paint more Civil War stuff again.

In a previous post, I wrote a review of Warhammer Historical: The Great War, and I liked the rules. So I bought some 10mm Pendraken Great War miniatures, which I also discussed in a blog post here. I got just enough miniatures to make a few units to eventually try out the rules with. The first up to be painted were some late war British.

I am by no means an expert in the period. Like I said, I'm just painting these as a temporary change of pace from the American Civil War miniatures I've been working on. So the colors may not be perfect, but they seem to look okay to me. They were painted using Games Workshop/Citadel paint.

First I primed them white and painted the uniforms Snakebite Leather.


I painted all the straps and pouches with Bleached Bone, flesh areas with Bronzed Flesh, boots with Shadow Grey, rifle with Bestial Brown, rifle barrel and bayonet with Mithril Silver. The base can be whatever color you want. I then put a wash of thinned down brown ink over the entire miniature (except for the bayonet, so that it stays shiny).


The miniatures have something on them that I think is a covered canteen. I've seen it painted blue in other pictures of Great War miniatures, so I painted those blue. I then painted some roughly square shaped red unit markings on the shoulders.


I then glued the miniatures to thin wooden 25mm circular bases from Litko Aerosystems, which I had spray painted brown. I put three of them to a base because in Warhammer Historical: The Great War, each 28mm miniature represents 3-4 men. I decided instead to use three 10mm miniatures to a base so that I'd be playing in 1:1 scale.


I then based them with a combination of brown and light tan sand/fine ballast, medium grey ballast, and green flock. I was attempting to get the look of rocky dirt/mud, with just a little bit of grass showing.


So there you have it. I think this method gave pretty good results, with relatively few steps. Let me know what you think.