Raise high ze black flags my children! - The Prussian Army of 1813-1815

I’ve now primed up the assembled 6th Reserve Regiment (minus some additional command).

I moved away from spray can’s to an airbrush for priming miniatures a few years ago and haven’t really looked back. Despite some early issues I’ve now got a pretty good system for priming my miniatures and it worked really well here.

As in the previous post, I assemble the miniatures and use blue-tac (poster tac) to stick them to tongue depressors (lolly sticks). Generally I try and get one sprue per stick, so six figures, in this case, this just provides a really simple way to check for duplicates when assembling.

Above are the three main stages I follow, these are:

• Initial prime with Vallejo Surface Primer Black
• Once this has dried (I usually give it a good hour) I follow this with a second prime of Vallejo Surface Primer Grey, this time with lighter passes and at a 45-degree angle, this leaves a good amount of back on the undersides and shadows.
• Finally, I follow on with a very quick highlight of Liquitex White Ink, from almost vertical, with a quick pass on the front and back.

I struggled for quite a while when first using an airbrush with it clogging, while I still have some issues, I’ve managed to overcome these with a few actions.

• Give it a good clean after use, I generally rinse the cup with water to remove any paint, then I run one or two cups (the bit you put the paint in) of clean water through it followed by around half a cup of airbrush cleaner.
• For the Vallejo primers, I used them at first out of the bottle, I’ve found that adding in thinner and most importantly a few drops of flow improver helps this massively, I don’t know the exact ratios but I have not more than 1/3 thinner and flow improver, maybe as little as 1/4, i also give these a good stir in the airbrush cup.

Wanting to stretch the bounds of my airbrush skills a bit I decided to basecoat the third battalion, who have a full blue uniform, using the airbrush.

I think the result looks very effective and really shows the benefit of zenithal priming. Hopefully, this will continue to look good as I start painting the miniatures.