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.

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.

Pendraken 10mm WW1 miniatures

I recently bought some 10mm World War 1 miniatures from Pendraken Miniatures in the UK. Since the Pendraken Miniatures website is disappointingly lacking in pictures and information about their miniatures, I thought I would post a description of the contents of the packs, some pictures of the miniatures, and my review of them. Hopefully this will be helpful for anyone considering purchasing some, or trying to decide on a scale or manufacturer to buy some Great War miniatures from. I bought several different packs each of Western Front British and Western Front German miniatures.

The packs of infantry typically have three poses total, one officer pose and two different poses of infantryman. The numbers of each appear to be very inconsistent. I've had packs with anywhere from 2-7 of the officer pose, with the rest split between the other two poses, not necessarily evenly. So this could be a real problem for anyone that wants a particular ratio of officers and men, or wants to split the two infantryman poses evenly for some reason. You won't be able to count on a certain number of officers, so you may end up with extras or have to buy more packs. Even the total number of figures in a pack isn't consistent, but they all had at least 30 figures.

Fist up, here's a picture of a couple of the infantry figures in front of a ruler to give an idea of their overall size. Click on any of the pictures for a larger view.



British
BP1 - Infantry in Cap


BP2 - Infantry in Helmet


BP3 - LMG in Helmet (10 figures, all the same pose)


BP15 - Highlanders


BP22 - High command (4 figures, 2 of each pose)



German
GP1 - Infantry in Picklehaube


GP2 - Infantry in Helmet


GP6 - German Stormtroopers (4 poses, including officer)


GP11 - HMG 08 in helmet (3 teams of two figures)


GP19 - High command (3 figures of two different poses, and one trench periscope?)


My overall impression of these 10mm Pendraken WW1 miniatures is favorable. They are fairly detailed and the details are crisp. They are mostly well cast, though a few had excessive amounts of flash on them. The figures look a bit stocky and not perfectly proportioned, but that is true of most 10mm miniatures. On the other hand, they are extremely sturdy miniatures, even the bayonets and rifle barrels. My other experience with 10mm miniatures is GHQs excellent 10mm American Civil War miniatures. They are amazingly well proportioned, but many of them are also extremely fragile, and I end up with many bent rifle barrels. That won't be a problem with these Pendraken miniatures. So aside from the oddly inconsistent figure numbers in the packs, which might be an issue for some people who want to be able to count on having certain ratios of officers to men, I would definitely recommend these. Of course, I haven't painted any of them yet, and that's when I'll really find out how good they are by how easy it is to paint the details.

The figures can be ordered straight from the Pendraken website. They don't have an online shopping cart, which is kind of annoying. So you have to e-mail them your order and the total and your payment information. I'd advise splitting up your credit card number into multiple e-mails if you go that route, just to be safe. But the service I got was good, the delivery was fast, and even with the expensive shipping from the UK to the US (which was about 20% of my order total), with the exchange rate it ended up not being all that expensive to order from them. It was cheaper to order straight from them than from anywhere else I was able to find online.