Painting Confederate regiment, step by step

Finished the next Regiment and for the first time I made notes of the colours I used so I will have them ready when I want to paint another and I will have forgotten again. I also took pictures of every step of the process. I am sharing this but since the page is picture heavy I have hidden it after the page break so you will have to press read more if you are interested.
Note that this is just how I did it and there are probably a thousand ways to do it better or quicker.

The Regiments represents the 15th Georgia and the figures are from Renegade. Added them to the ACW gallery.


Changing styles...
To get units on the table more quickly I have adjusted my painting style. While I used to paint batches of four miniatures or so, I now paint larger batches for certain periods. In this case sixteen. This is a significant change since now I paint units instead of miniatures. A new approach with a different way of thinking. As I start I now imagine the end result for the unit as primary objective instead of the miniature that now becomes just a piece of the final product. I have painted too many tiny details in units I guess that are never noticed anyway.
In this case I aimed for the grey irregular look of the Confederates but I also wanted to make it a bit more interesting. With the red flag and the red parts of the officer and drummer I decided to do a madder red blanket roll near the centre and add red flowers to give a bit of colour to the centre to make the unit stand out a bit more.
As for the painting itself I more or less use the method from the well known Dallimore book starting with shade colours and applying highlights.

Who has the right to eyesight?
In the past all my miniatures proudly owned these rights. But after careful consideration I have withdrawn the rights and limited them to certain miniatures. This saves a lot of time and I don’t think eyes necessarily give a better look or add anything to the finished unit. And the other thing with eyes is that if you do them badly it is immediately noticeable.  It’s one of the features everyone will automatically look at when they pick up a mini. So I only grant eyesight to command or maybe a special front rank figure that draws attention, but that’s it. This
unit only has one pair of eyes and they belong to Col. Dudley M. DuBose. The rest will have to follow him anyway. But if you do them, please make them tiny, no even more tiny, and if you think you are done reconsider and tiny them even more, until you almost can’t see them.. If you are still here you will do a good job as your eye for detail is amazing!

This Regiment took me around twelve to fourteen hours to finish; so slightly less than an hour per figure. The fact that these Renegades minis are so easy to paint also reduced the painting time. Oh, and putting this post together adds another hour.

For the step by step press Read More below.

There we go. Scary, these pics are rather large...
Painting notes after the pictures.

1. Primed black, drybrush metal Gunmetal grey

2. Muskets

Musket close-up

 

3. Flesh

Where are you?

4. A lot of grey

5. Some shades of brown

6. Haversacks

6. There they are

7+8. Red leather and black

9,10,11 Hair,canteen and final blanket rolls

12. Plates and buttons

13. headwear

14. 40x40 bases

15. Suddenly Command arrives, painted in previous batch of two Command stands

16. Basing is covered in a future post

 

My painting notes

1. Vallejo (V) Gunmetal grey
2 Muskets: Foudry (F) stock musket brown B, GW devlon mud wash, stock musket brown C
3. Flesh. V Red Leather, F expert flesh 127 B, C, E
4. Needs some (intermediate) mixing
-V Black grey, dark grey, neutral grey, light grey, F austrian grey
Started with couple using black grey as shade and adding more figures using lighter colour as shade
-V black grey/F Stone A, F Stone A, -F Stone C
-F Granite A,B, B/C
5 Some browns
F SpearshaftA, Chestnut A, Chestnut C, Palomino C
V German cammo black,V Flat brown, V beige brown, V cork brown
F Rawhide A,B,C/C
6. V Light grey, F Austian white A,F Austrian white C
F Black A, A/B,B
7+8.Black A, A/B,B
Red leather:V burnt umber, V cavalry brown, V red leather
9-11. Hair
mostly done in black and brown stage, I use the one starting with german cammo black a lot for hair.
brown canteens were also done.
Blue canteens: V Luftwaffe uniform, F British blue grey A, F British blue grey C
blanket rolls:
F Terracota A, Madder redA, Madder red C
V German cammo dark green, V german fielgrey, V green grey
F Bay brown A,B,C
F Quagmire darkened A,B,lightened C
12. Plates and buttons
GW Gold, devlon mud wash, touch of GW Gold
13. Headwear.
Some of the greys and browns and F buff leather triad. Need to be in same colours to prevent them becoming a circus band.

Flag by GBM Designs

Not taking attention to the left stand

That's it. Curious if you find this kind of posts useful or not . Plan is to get the Prussians notes online next.

Now Sam GO, we need the reinforcements as you have witnessed...