In just under three weeks our local big convention kicks off – GottaCon 2013 is February 1st, 2nd & 3rd at the Pearkes Recreation Centre.
I’ll be running a Russian Civil War scenario, possibly with a Back of Beyond flavour. It’ll be a variant of my Even Whites Bleed Red scenario from last year’s Trumpeter Salute convention, mostly because I haven’t yet come up with a more entertaining title than that!
I’ve got Red sailors, cavalry and more Red regular troopers on the painting bench as we speak, and some nice scenery bits to add to my existing Russian scenery. Now, to get off the computer and back to that painting bench!
It seems “what colours do you use for WW1 Russian uniforms?” is one of those things that comes up again and again. I’ve been painting an awful lot of Russians (of various WW1/Russian Civil War flavours!) for a year or two now, and I’ve been asked for painting recipes in email, in comments here, and on forums. It’s time to do something I should have done months ago – write a flippin’ blog post that I can link people to, to save myself the trouble of typing the same thing out again and again…
I paint with Reaper Master Series paints, largely because they’re carried by my FLGS and the price point (especially when you buy in Triad sets) is better than GW or Vallejo. Reaper has this awesome web-gadget called the Power Palette that you can fire an image in, then extract the closest Master Series colours from. I scanned a couple of images from the Osprey Publishing RCW books and got the Power Palette to suggest a list of colours for me.
A Russian Civil War Bolshevik infantry force.
I’ll add better shots of my painted figures eventually, but here’s my basic World War One/Russian Civil War Russian uniform recipe, all paints Reaper Master Series unless stated otherwise.
For all figures: Base: Khaki Shadow Wash: GW Devlan Mud (note that this is now out of production (thanks, geniuses at GW…) so I’ll eventually have to find an alternative…) First highlight back up with straight Khaki Shadow.
My Reds get a much darker Devlan Mud wash, the Khaki Shadow highlight, and that’s pretty much it.
My Whites get another round of highlighting with Terran Khaki. Officers in especially spiffy uniforms get a final highlight with Khaki Highlight.
Some Russian uniforms seem to have darker, greener trousers; I use Military Green as a base there, sometimes just as a wash over Khaki Shadow.
The Russian uniform procurement process, even before the Civil War started, was known to produce quite a bit of variation in what was nominally the same colour of cloth. I use Bone Shadow and Polished Bone as alternate base colours, especially in the Red forces. For the Reds, I also use a lot of other random colours – other greens, browns and greys especially, as the early RCW Red Guard/Red Army had enormous trouble (even by the usual Russian standards, which is saying something!) keeping anything like an actual “uniform” appearance!
The Whites had equal trouble at various stages, but I keep my Whites in neater trim than my Reds, purely so the two forces can be told apart on the tabletop!
For Cossack blue trousers, Soft Blue base. I need to rediscover what I highlight Soft Blue with, I appear not to have written it down in my painting notes… I also have no photos at all of my Cossack infantry plaston, which is a shame.
Red Sailors! See below for painting notes.
For Red Sailors, Worn Navy for blue base, Leather White for white base, Pure Black for black, Khaki Shadow (again) for khaki/green. Kerchiefs are Sapphire Blue.
The Worn Navy gets a very thin wash of 1:1 Worn Navy:Pure Black for shadows, then highlighted back with Worn Navy and Soft Blue. Pure Black coats get a highlight of 1:1 Walnut Brown:Pure Black. Leather White gets a Pure White highlight. The white stripes on hats and kerchiefs is actually a 1:1 Leather White:Pure White mix.
I’m probably going to go back into my entire batch of Red Sailors and do another round of highlighting on the blue clothing, it’s a bit bland currently. More Soft Blue, maybe with one further brighter highlight.
Hope this helps, I’ll add better photos as I take them!
As I mentioned recently, I’ve been rebuilding my Russian Civil War cards for Through the Mud & the Blood over the last few weeks. I’ve finally got the revised versions of my existing Red & White Russian card sets for RCW to a point where I’m happy with them, so for a change of pace this evening I set out to design some cards for some of the other forces we’ll have available.
Quickly assembled screenshots of draft M&B cards, some revised, some new.
Above, a quick screenshot of the current state of my cards. The Red Russian card has slightly changed background art; all the Big Man cards have a significantly changed layout with more information, and I’ve got a basic background for both British and Warlord Chinese forces! I have a small force of British in tropical kit, and late in 2012 my brother picked up a starter force of Warlord Chinese from Copplestone, which he promises to paint up one day.
One thing I’m not sure of: flag or star insignia for the Warlord Chinese forces? The flag fits in better with my other force cards, but the star works a bit better with text on top of it, as that black stripe on the flag really gets in the way of legible text. Opinions in comments below, please!
The British are also, of course, likely to be useful for other M&B folks, so I’ll get that set done up next, probably in February after GottaCon 2013, where I’ll be running an M&B-powered RCW game!
I’m hard-pressed to pick a favourite, but purely for graphical awesomeness and a slightly surreal message, it might be this American poster telling people to fund a hungry machine gun.
Feed a machine-gun – the Great War equivalent of those “Feed a child” ads we see today, I guess?
“Aviatrix” is the feminine version of “aviator”, but of course you knew that already. This fabulous pair is courtesy Kemon’s Flickr stream, which has a huge array of mostly aviation-related stuff, a lot of it from the interwar pulp era!
Rummaging through other people’s blogs (as one does) I tripped over this nice two-part series on Eastern Front gates: Part One, Part Two from August 2012 on Miniatures & Terrain.
These gates with the tiny shingle roofs over them seem fairly common in Russia & parts of Eastern Europe, and I’ve been meaning to make one as part of a larger churchyard for my Russian onion-domed church.
I haven’t posted any random pulp graphics for a while, so here’s a 1920s/30s style British India luggage sticker featuring the Taj Mahal.
The British Raj in India, etc – an interwar-style graphic for your amusement.
I’ll probably throw together a “Warbard’s 2012 in Review” type post this coming week, but in the meantime, hope you had a safe and entertaining New Year’s Eve, a good 2012, and are looking forward to an even better 2013!
(Incidentally, the Taj Mahal graphic was originally from the awesome Open Clip Art Library site, home of all sorts of awesome Public Domain SVG & PNG images. I’ve mentioned OCAL here before, but it’s always worth reminding people of!)
The boardgaming website Shut Up & Sit Down has an excellent, if slightly long, article on explaining the rules, and some of the hazards of being the explainer of rules. It ties in nicely with some of the things I’ve written here about running games at conventions and in other situations where players aren’t familiar with the rules in use.
The comments on the article have some useful followup and additional points, too.
“A Horse of a Different Colour” is nine parts long, and goes into fascinating detail about how horses get the colours they do, as well as how to paint the beasts! Part One is an introduction; Part Two talks about markings, white and otherwise, and oddities like the “bloody-shouldered grey” horse. The whole series can be found in reverse order under the horse of a different colour tag over at Trouble. Finally Part Nine is entirely on painting horses, using the stuff discussed previously to get good, interesting horses.
And yes, my renewed interest in painting horseflesh is because there’s more RCW Cossacks on the painting table, as well as a unit of Cuirassiers for my long-neglected English Civil War/Thirty Year’s War army!
As we’ve played Through the Mud & the Blood-powered Russian Civil War skirmishes over the past year or two (has it really been that long?) we’ve gradually tweaked and modified several of the custom cards we use. This has lead to a number of cards with pencilled notes all over them, a few blank cards re-purposed as hand-written replacements, and various other inelegant things, so I’m taking advantage of some post-Christmas quiet to begin rebuilding my custom card deck. New cards in progress – new version in the top row, originals in the lower row.
I’m starting with the Big Man cards, which are by far the most common in an M&B game deck. I’ve removed the “Big Man” text, as it’s obvious without having to be pointed out every time. Command Radius has been joined by a reminder of how much a given BM can influence Fire/Melee die rolls, and there’s space for special abilities or whatever. I’ve also gotten rid of the “Big Man #x” text, as we found we were often ignoring it in favour of a simple pencilled number at the top of a card.
I’ll be adding some notes on the rules to many of other cards, especially Heroic Leader, Dynamic Commander and Friction, which often cause confusion. As well, I’m going to do up a series of “Troop Cards”, which will be quick reference cards for the players roughly the size of recipe cards, with basic details on the troop types, equipment and vehicles in their forces.
