Brunswick line infantry

This Brunswick 3rd line battalion took very little time to paint and a very long time to complete! I originally started it in June but was distracted by various other projects and commitments. I finally had some time off work last week so was able to get them done, but not before a bit of a varnishing disaster along the way...

Having never painted Brunswickers, I wondered how I might be able to make them more visually interesting. I see other painters sometimes contrast the areas by using black and very dark greys, rather than painting them all black. This looks quite good, but I really wanted my figures to be entirely black, with minimal highlights to avoid any sense of them looking grey. They are the 'Black Brunswickers' after all.

The idea I came up with was to use a combination of matt and semi-gloss blacks to create the contrasts I was after. I used matt black on the clothing and a semi-gloss black on selected items like the belts, straps, shako visor etc.

In the end, it looked okay. Not brilliant, but it sort of worked...until for some reason I decided to give the whole lot of them a coat of spray-on matt varnish. I have never varnished any of my 20mm miniatures. There's usually not much need to, since they mostly sit safely on their shelves with only the occasional bit of gaming done at home. However, a few chips and scratches here and there had recently made me wonder whether I should try and protect my painting efforts a bit more. The spray can I tried was supposed to give a matt finish, but once dried it really was more like high gloss! Perhaps I went in too heavy, I'm not sure. Anyway, I ended up wasting a morning having to go back over them with some of the 'Anti-shine' by Warlord Games to knock down the gloss. This worked quite well, but I also repainted some of the matt black areas.

The straps and other parts which were supposed to be semi-gloss have been left looking a bit too shiny for my liking. I might revisit them at some point and dull those areas down as well, but for now I think they've spent far too long on the paint bench, so it's time to move on to another unit.

That next unit will be some Hanoverians; however, I mainly want to focus on terrain for the next couple of months. If I can get these Hanoverians and a few other units painted before the end of the year, I'll be happy with that. 2020 hasn't been the most productive one for me in the hobby, and like a lot of things this year, my plan to make good progress with the British and Allied armies this year has rather gone off the rails. Hopefully, things will get back on track soon.

(As a side note, I recently watched a Youtube video by Liberator240 who talked about the Winsor & Newton Professional Matte Varnish that he recently started using for his figures, so I'm thinking of giving that a try next time - on a test piece first, of course!)