Qin Army - FINISHED

It’s been a brief season of completion around here -- my 10mm Ancient Chinese army is finished. As in, 100% totally done with everything I'm ever gonna do to them. How often do ADD wargamers get to say that? They are cleaned, primered, painted, varnished, based, textured, and flocked. All 1400 or so of 'em. I even went back and painted little Chinese characters for "soldier," "horse," "arrow," "art," and "war," onto the banners. Especially gratifying was that Robert saw one of the stands, and just started talking about what those words might have meant -- he just took the characters for granted, which is nice, considering I had to look them up on the internet and wasn't 100% sure they were right!

Before posting this, I'd thought I'd posted about the army at least once between now and the time I finished dry brushing them, but the truth is the baseing went so fast that I was done with it by the time I got around to posting anything. So I'll just post this, and go back with gallery shots later after I get around to taking beauty shots of the army.



The basing was done in pretty much my normal way, except that I didn't paint anything. When the figures were glued down to the metal plates I used for bases, extra glue on the stand was soaked up with sand. At times I would add little puddles of super glue just to get the sand piles. Then I mixed up some of my standard issue coffee paste and smeared it over all the bases, trying to get semi-clean feet lines and nice blends with the sand, without covering it all. Then I'd sprinkle just a bit of sand over the while thing while the coffee paste was wet, giving me darks and highlights without needing to paint them or anything.



Then I went back over them all, placing small spotchy patches of watered-down white glue. Into these patches were placed tufts of static grass, rather than flock, giving the army the look of walking through knee high grass. These pics are from just before I added the fake grass.



I'm pretty happy with the way this army turned out.



Granted, hell will at least be in danger of freezing before I do another project in 10mm, but now that they are done they do look pretty damn good all arrayed in ranks for battle. Honestly, I just hope I like playing Ancients! It will suck if I did all that work, actually completed an army -- not just a unit, but an entire army! -- only to find out I don't like the game. But hay, I've got some fancy chinamen!