Painting 10mm Great War Germans

In a previous post, I wrote a tutorial on Painting 10mm Great War British. But since they'll need someone to fight, in this post I'll go over a step by step method I used to paint some 10mm Great War Germans.

The miniatures are all made by Pendraken. You can see a review of many of the World War 1 figures here. I'm not an expert in the Great War period, so the colors may not be perfect. In fact, I had a lot of trouble trying to replicate the slightly greenish-grey color of the uniforms, but I think I came up with a method that gives decent results without too much extra effort. All the paints I used are Games Workshop/Citadel, and I'll give the specific colors I used in case you want to replicate this method.

First step is to prime the miniatures white. I used Smelly Primer.


Then paint the uniforms Camo Green.


Paint all the belts and pouches with Scorched Brown.


The paint I used on the helmet no longer has a label, so I'm not sure what color that was. Perhaps Snot Green. Any kind of dark green should be okay. Also paint the boots Shadow Grey.


Paint the rifle and the base Bestial Brown.


Paint the bayonet, rifle barrel, canteen cap, and metal ring on the back with Mithril Silver.


Paint the face and hands with Bronzed Flesh.


Wash the entire thing with thinned down Black Ink. Yes, I know it still looks green, not grey. That's okay.


Paint the bayonet sheath Chaos Black. Now drybrush the uniform with Codex Grey. This part is a bit tricky, since you have to try not to get any grey anywhere else on the miniature.


The end result is that the uniform is mostly grey, with some green showing. Up close it looks odd, with areas of grey and areas of green. But at a little bit of a distance, the colors blend together and look grey with a greenish tint, which is what I was going for. Here are some pictures of the finished results.


I tried drybrushing the Codex Grey right after painting the uniform Camo Green, before painting anything else. That way there is no danger of getting the Codex Grey on other parts of the model. But then the black ink made it turn out too dark. Next time I might try doing that but with a much lighter grey color, and hopefully that will turn out okay and make the process much easier.