Sunday Update

Koreans Started!

Yesterday afternoon and evening saw me doing a lot of figure prep - 72 heavy cavalry, 8 light horse, 16 light foot archers and 48 levy troops. In the end I did use some of the "Korean cavalry with melee weapons" figures to give some variety of officer types.

This morning I glued the horses for the heavy cavalry onto painting sticks, then when the PVA had dried I superglued the riders onto the horses. This afternoon I primed them - as the horses have metal barding and the riders have a lot of armour, I've chosen to use the Vallejo black polyurethane primer instead of my normal grey gesso for these. That will allow me to go straight to dry-brushing them metallic areas rather than letting gesso dry then painting on a black undercoat. I will need to undercoat some areas that will be painted with light or bright colours.

The observant amongst you will notice that I'm using narrower sticks than normal. There are two good reasons for that. Firstly, it allows me to get into the undercut behind the barding with primer. Secondly, it saves space!

For the light foot, levy troops and light horse (plus the regular medium foot when I get round to them) I've decided to paint them on their bases. Also, rather than my usual basing gunk I'm going to use a mix of ballast grades which I'm sticking on before priming. With the amount of white clothing the infantry will have, I'll be priming white.

So, this evening I glued the light foot, levy and light horse figures onto their bases and then hit them with ballast. If I have time later, I might prime them before going to bed.

I guess it isn't really a post without pics, so here are two showing the current state of play.

L to R: Levy foot with heavy weapons (8 bases); Levy foot archers (8 bases); Regular light horse (4 bases); Regular light foot archers (8 bases)

The heavy cavalry - 72 figures = 24 bases = 6 battle groups. Half will be painted as Singi Guard cavalry; half as Kwang Gun/Singi Gun cavalry

The rest of the figures have been sorted into units for when I get round to painting them. It was while I was sorting them that I thought I'd better check how many 40x20mm bases I had. Lucky I did as I was massively short compared to what I'll need, so an order was duly placed.

The figures I've got prepped and (almost) primed now should be interesting to paint. The cavalry should be quite colourful; the light foot will allow me to quickly test out the colour scheme for the regular heavy foot; the levy troops will let me see whether painting figures so closely packed on their bases is workable.

Given the time constraints I'm under to get these finished (it's only 5 weeks until Campaign), I might not be able to paint them to my usual standard. However, with the foot being quite simple clothing it might just be possible, especially as I'll be working up from white primer and most of their clothing is white.