American Rifles

This is a unit of American Riflemen I've painted up slowly over the past month and a half during the rennovation of my hobby room. The figures are from the Perry Miniatures AWI range - pack AW35 - American Riflemen Advancing. The figures are based up as two skirmish stands for Volley & Bayonet. They'll get plenty of use as skirmish elements of Morgan's and Dearborn's units as well as other at-large rifle battalions as needed.

These figures were painted using my usual technique of block painting followed by a wash. For this unit instead of using my usual homemade wash, I tried out the new washes from Citadel. These washes, while quite nice, do have a tendency to lighten up after they dry. Not knowing this when I first applied them I was aghast at how muddy the wash made the figures look. I paniced, wet my brush with water and cleaned most of the wash off. After the figures dried it looked like I hadn't done anything. After a second application of the wash without the panic they ended up as you see here. I used two different color washes: Sepia on the light brown and tan coated figures and black on the blue and dark brown coated figures.

Although these are wonderful sculpts, they do suffer from one problem commen to a lot of 'advancing' poses from many figure lines: the figures all seem to be leaned forward a lot. While this makes for a nice looking pose, photographing the figures ends up being quite challenging. For the photo on the bottom right I ended up having to prop the stand up to be able to see the faces of the figures.