WIP: Death Korps of Krieg Army part 1

Long ago I decided to paint a Korps of Krieg army, based on the same scheme in which I painted a squad of five Krieg Grenadiers (you can see the squad here). I decided to retrieve the process which I started since it is possible that I resume working on it. The first two parts that I will show are from early 2009 so they are a little outdated, but the following parts will show the current work.

I can divide this long and laborious process in three distinct parts. One part will be about the infantry miniatures, another one about the vehicles and a third part will show the work done on the bases.

INFANTRY PAINTING

Painting a lot of miniatures in high standard and the fastest way possible is difficult. The most important thing is having a good plan regarding the process. The best is to try to use the airbrush for the most part of the process as possible because it saves much work and time. Of course, although boring, it's very effective to paint in series. This form is appropriate until it becomes a torture, then it's best to stop and get on with whatever other thing we prefer to paint because it can turn into a horrible task and suffering is not our goal. Here I show the process I followed on the first batch of guards.

First I assembled, cleaned and glued all the guards on temporary bases. Then I glued the bases into another base, which in this case is an old paintpot (currently use plastic sticks glued to the feet of the figures because that way the airbrush work is easier, but back in 2009 I used old paintpots). The bases are temporary because when I finish painting the figures, I will take them off from there and put them on their final bases which are painted separately, making it much more easy and efficient for me.





After that I primed the miniatures in the predominant colour which in this case, is Vallejo's Dark Navy Blue airbrushed. Not the best paint to use with an airbrush but I wanted to use more or less the same colours I used for the other Kriegs I painted. After this I painted the lights with airbrush, first with Citadel's Hawk Turquoise and then with a mix of the Turquoise with Citadel's Shadow Grey and a bit of white.
I put pictures of the two basic types of Krieg I have.




Now I give shadows with a normal brush (I can also use airbrush for large areas in shadow) with Vallejo Chocolate Brown and Black. The truth is that the change is not very noticeable in the photos but if you look carefully you might see the difference.




Now I painted the plates of all the shoulders and the vests and shin guards of the grenadiers with Rotting Flesh. I did it with normal brush and it proved pretty horrible. At this point in the process I realized that I did wrong, it would have been much more productive to start painting the pads directly with airbrush, and then once finished, cover the parts in Rotting Flesh with Maskol and then paint the uniform with airbrush. Now it is much more difficult because I would have to cover the entire uniforms with Maskol so it is not worth it. For the next I'll keep that in mind and my work will be simpler and shorter. This step took me 10 to 15 minutes per figure, considering that the grenadiers have much more work put into them because they wear chest vests and shin guards. Total time so far per figure: about 1 hour.





Now I make a gradient on all the plates by just using the base colour. The lights will be done adding Vallejo's Ice Yellow to the Rotting Flesh base up to pure white in final light points. I did the shadows adding Citadel's Catachan Green to the base. Then I gave glazes of Citadel's Green Goblin to make the colour closer to my original grenadiers (these differences in tone will be corrected in the end when I have a complete picture of all the miniatures and their colour). This process took me about 15 minutes per set of normal infrantry and 30 minutes for the grenadiers. So at this point I spent 75 minutes with each infrantryman and 90 minutes with each grenadier.