This week I finished painting my Modern US Infantry from RebelMinis. I really like the minis, the mix of poses, and the goggles! They are 21 miniatures for $10.99 what is a very nice price (less than 0,45€ each).
This time I bought a couple of paints with the specific colors I was looking for. My time and skills are not enough for mixing and fancy painting, so I have to pay a few euros to get something different from red, blue and yellow.
The part I’m less happy with are the bases. The texture I gave to the stuff I used (wall filler) was not fine enough. It looks like a gooey mud which is not what I intended. I will look for different methods next time.
I once more used the GW varnish, and again the shine is a bit too much. I read shiny varnishes better protect the paint job, so I guess there is a bright side 😛 .
As I had just received my new Panzerkampfwagen IV from PlasticSoldier, I assembled one and took a photo with the marines around it 🙂 .
It is just a bit too small, but it might be the marines being based. I’m considering basing the tanks to give them a bit more height, but I like the tracks on the road so much 🙂 .
Historical inaccuracies are obviously not a problem for me 😀 . I plan to run some games in a near future setting, so mixing WWII with modern infantry and aliens feels right. For me at least.
Now time to re-read the Tomorrow’s War rules and preparse some gaming aids. There are some in the official forums, but they have too much color to be printed, I need something more printer friendly.
Any ideas for easy and cheap basing? Suggestions for a first scenario to try Tomorrow’s War? What do you think of my crappy painting?
Keep on playing 
I like them a lot. Pretty awesome. Considering the size, I think you do a pretty much good job.
I agree with the bases: the colour is not right (even though I do not see mud there). A dark green would have worked better. About the bumpiness, not sure how to control it. Have you thought about sanding them before paint? Continuing with colour critics, I think you have to rethink some colours which are normally used in a way which is settled too deep in our mind:
Glass is not blue. Either is transparent (if there is more light beyond) or simply black. Black or dark grey works much better than the blue we usually used in our childhood drawings.
Brown is very artificial and homogeneous for the bases (too saturated). Mud is seldomly brown. Some gray and green patterns would have improve them. Now it looks like shit. And with shit I mean excrements, crap, feces… which is great if you intended it, but a less saturated colour would have made a better job, I think to represent mud, earth, dust… even if it tends to yellow (sand). It is more a problem of saturation than tone.
In any case, I like a lot the green and the brown of the uniforms, the colour for the skin is ok, and the next step would be to achieve a graduation in the colours (stained faces, camouflage fabrics…). I know the time you have, and the main thing to remember is that
Glass is not blue, but it perfectly relfects the beautiful sky 😛 . Black is soooo boring.
I’ve been thinking about the basing problem this week. I totally agree with you that the current bases are crappy at best. More than the colour or tone, I think the main problem is the texture. If you check the minis painted at the website of the seller, you will see they are painted in a plain brown. However, the texture has more grain than mine, and that suits better to such small figures.
I wonder if there is any way to change the current basing without ruining the whole figure…