The Verdun Project: Painting Late War French Infantry - Part 3

This is the third and last part of my short series of posts about painting late Great War French infantry. In the last post, I covered painting the mid-tone and highlights for all the colours but for Horizon Bleu and a couple of details on the figures.

I left the Horizon Bleu until last to make sure that the colour tones blended uniformly across the demi-platoon. I used a 50/50 combination of Vallejo Model Colour Grey Blue and Vallejo Model Colour Mirage Grey for the mid-tone, with a highlight of nearly 100% Vallejo Model Colour Grey Blue mixed with a dab of Vallejo Model Colour white. (Full painting details are on the “Late Great War French Infantry Painting Template” in the resources section of this Blog).

It took some time to work through the Horizon Bleu colours on the figures, but I resisted the temptation to move from the mid-tone to highlight each figure individually. I’ve tried this figure-by-figure approach in the past, but I’ve generally found that it takes longer.

I tend to apply the highlight in short lines of paint, attempting to follow the folds of cloth on the figure. I found dipping the paintbrush in Windsor & Newton Acrylic Flow Improver helped before painting the highlights, just to make sure the brush ran smoothly over the ridges and edges where the highlight would show.

After about 90 minutes, I was done. The only thing left on the figures was to make a couple of small marks on the collar tips of each figures (with Vallejo Model Colour Dark Blue) to denote a representation of the regimental unit. And finally, I painted the edges of the bases of the figures with a hard wearing coat of Louvre Acrylic Black.

Painting a thick black edge on the figures is always the last thing I do to the figures before varnishing. I like the way that the edge breaks the figure from the terrain on the wargames table. It’s a personal choice, but its something I like to do with my figures, at least for the Great War where I’ve universally used 3mm bases for ease of players picking them up during our games.

And there we have it.  A French demi-platoon, with Vivien-Bessieres rifle grenades, from around the time of the battle of Verdun in 1916.

 

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this short series. Next post will be a figure scale comparison across a number of late Great War French 28mm manufacturers, followed by a book review or two. Hope you can join me for those.