I’ve had this project hanging over me for quite some time. For an upcoming game we needed this chariots painted up. As the game’s host’s house has been under renovation for almost a year (it seems), he hasn’t had a chance to get his painted, so it was up to me. In the vein of just-in-time logistics, I completed them this weekend for next weekend’s game.
(As an aside, the only all-nighters I pulled in college were to get battalions painted for the next day’s big Napoleonic war-game.)
The chariots are recasts of old Marx sets. As I was finishing up this project I was reminded how much I hate plastic. I did all the things you are supposed to do. I washed the figures. I used Krylon Fusion (which is supposed to bond to soft plastic). I buried a statue of St. Anthony upside down in the garden. Actually I didn’t do that, but I did the other stuff. No matter what, unless you paint with the flexible artists’ acrylics that come in the toothpaste tubes (really too hard to work with if you want to paint any detail), I rarely have any luck getting the paint to stick to soft plastic. (I haven’t had the same problems others report getting their paint to stick to the Bones plastic figures, however.)
So anyway, the six chariots are done. Thank God! I fear, however, that more and more paint will flake off these every time I game with them. The required five-inch-square bases won’t be available until I get to the game on Friday, so I’m worried about their condition by the time I get down to Charlotte with them.
I think they turned out okay. Each one is a different color to make them easier to distinguish on the track. I didn’t put a lot of detail into them, but the sculpting and molding didn’t help me much. They’re good enough for the game next weekend, and I hope they last for a few games before they return to the bare plastic from whence they came. I’m anxious to get them mounted onto bases so that players can handle the bases instead of the soft figures.
P.S. I’ve continued to slog away on my 16 battalions of 10mm Russian grenadiers. I painted all the tiny muskets this weekend.