Painting Japanese troops for Burma
This guide follows the same basic procedure as the guide for painting the British. However, to avoid repeating loads of basic information, I will just concentrate on the colour choices and any other differences that arise here. If you haven't looked through the British guide yet it's probably a good idea to go and do it now. You can find it here: Here is a Platoon of Japanese with the basic preparatory work done. The flesh has been painted wth Foundry Flesh 5A and washed with Coat d'arms 133 Flesh Wash. The uniforms have been painted with Foundry Buff Leather 7A and given a wash with Games Workshop Chestnut Ink.
The flesh has been finished with two highlights. The first is Foundry Flesh 5A and the second is Coat d'armes 215 Oriental Flesh. This gives a very caricatured yellow tinge to the skin which is fine if you want cartoon Japanese like I do but not if you want something a little more accurate. I would suggest your final highlight should be Foundry Flesh 7B if this is the case.
The uniforms have also received two highlights. Firstly with Foundry Buff Leather 7A and then finished with Foundry Buff Leather 7B.
The webbing, puttees, boots and helmets have been painted with Foundry Spearshaft 13A and washed with Games Workshop Chestnut Ink. Once everything has received a coat of matt varnish and the ink has stopped shining everything should look fine. I don't intend to highlight these brown bits any further.
Here are the finished figures. I found I wasn't able to leave the webbing as it was so I highlighted it, along with the helmets and Officer's boots, with Foundry Spearshaft 13A. I left the men's puttees and boots as they were. I also went over the rifle slings and painted them the same as the webbing, I should have done this at the same time as the webbing, but nobody's perfect. The final stages left were to paint the weapons and then add final details.
The guns were painted with black to remove the last vestiges of unwanted colour and then the wooden parts were painted with Foundry Spearshaft 13A and highlighted with Foundry Spearshaft 13B and C. The bayonet scabbards were painted black and then these and the metal parts of all the weapons were highlighted with Foundry Charcoal Black 34B. The bayonets and Officer's sword were painted in Games Workshop Boltgun metal and then highlighted with Games Workshop Mithril Silver so they really shine. I painted the water bottles with Foundry Dusky Flesh 6A to add a bit of variety to the webbing and picked out the stars on the headgear with Foundry Lemon 1C. The odd bits of foliage on the helmets were painted with Foundry Storm Green 27A and highlighted with 27C. The Officer's glasses were dotted with Foundry Vivid Blue 22C. I was going to do something more fancy but couldn't be bothered; these are wargames figures and I've got plenty more to do in a short amount of time. Finally, they've been superglued to their group bases to await their jungle basing and varnishing. |
|