Great War German Casualty Bases

You might remember that earlier this year I prepared a pair of British stretcher bearers and a handful of British casualties for use in our games of “Through the Mud and theBlood”.   It’s taken a while to do the same for the German forces, but in this post I’ve blogged the matching German casualty bases.

On each of the bases I tried to make a small impression to place a micro-dice into,  This serves to denote “shock” in the wargame, a feature which generally inhibits or restricts the actions of the unit suffering the “shock”.  We found in a lot of games that the micro-dice can get knocked over, hence the need for an impression in the base in which the micro-dice could be stored.  Kudos again to Curt from Analogue Hobbies for coming up with this fantastic idea.

You might also remember that I’d started out these bases with a grey undercoat.  While this was very easy to spray on, I found it was far from ideal for heavily terrained bases where you want to have degree of dark shadow to emphasise the varying contours of the base. 

I therefore repainted the bases in matt black before quickly painting the ground work in very muted colours.  Like all my bases for the Great War I opted for a mix of mid-brown mud and a slate grey, reflecting the key colours of many of the terrain boards on which we play.

The foliage on the bases was coarse hair floor-matting, cut into small shapes and glued down before undercoating black and then highlighting in a variety of browns and ochres.

I then picked out the scattered brick debris in Plaka Rot-Braun, with highlights of Plaka Ziegelrot and Plaka Orange.  I’ve mentioned it before, but the chalky thick Plaka paints are perfect for this kind of base modelling.  They also tend to be very reasonably priced.  I always get mine at the fantastic Cornellisons in Central London, although there are plenty of suppliers on-line.

The I tried something which was new for me.  I’ve been experimenting with MIG pigments for groundwork and vehicles on and off for a year.  I decided to try and go further with the casualty bases, picking out the rust highlights on the barbed wire supports and using the MIG Industrial City Dirt to try and give a real grimy, battlefield feel to the bases.  The pigment is easy to mix with either water or a water-based medium (I used Plaka Wasserbasis) if you want to run it like a wash over the base work.  I also tried to dry-brush the pigment into parts of the groundwork, giving a super-light spray with matt varnish after applying.  It was fun, but in the end I wasn’t really sure that it was worth the effort, or that it made any difference.  I would be very interested indeed if anyone’s had better, or simply any other, experience in using pigments for terrain or groundwork as I think there’s a lot of interesting effects which might be achieved in this area.

After finishing the bases, all the was left was to paint the casualty figures.  I’ve still got a couple of “walking wounded” to finish, but the others are done and varnished except for the final addition of some barbed wire around the wire supports.

I opted for German camouflage helmets on the casualty bases with the aim that these should fit with the Stosstruppen detachment which I’ve been painting at the same time.

Here’s the micro-dice holding casualty bases alongside some older German casualty bases, a number of which have barbed wire already added.

Hopefully I’ll be able to post the final couple of casualty bases before the end of the week, following which I’ve two projects for September.  

The first is to finish the Stosstruppen and Stellungsbattalion detachments which fit alongside and within Das Rattenloch.  I thought I would blog these as a step-by-step painting guide, similar to the British infantry I did last Winter.  

And second up will be a small Pictish warband, the figures for which I picked up at my local club last night.  So more of the Painted People for all you Dux Britanniarum fans very shortly.

Hope you can join me for all of that.  It’s going to be a busy September!