A 2mm Primer

Posted On October 8, 2020

With three full armies of these tiny little blokes under my belt, I’m finally ready to share some experience with you, dear reader. By no means an expert, the best I can offer is my experience working with this incredibly small scale.

First up, when you spray coat them, use a very light touch. As you can see, a light dusting provides highlights to the raised areas, and a bit of shadow in the deep crevices. As smaller figures, you don’t even need to use the black primer, white drybrush method with them – the shadows arise naturally.

I’ve mounted my primed figures on small tongue depressors or craft sticks for ease of handling. No chance to handle these figs any other way!

Painting was a breeze. Using nothing more than the usual washes and a little dry brushing it is a simple matter to pick out just enough detail to get these guys looking like a proper army. You want to use bright primary colors, just as one does with 6mm figures, and a little light drybrush to lighten them up one more notch and you’re good.

Here you can see what a simple schema of yellow on white can do to make these guys look good. The horses are a mix of colors hit with a unifying wash of dark ink.

The next issue is, of course, basing. I’ve opted for simple 1-inch square bases for my figures as they can be used individually or combined to create larger formations – depending on the ruleset.

These craft squares are only a nickel each, and while they are a bit thick compared to the units…they provide a better handle for the unit than the figures. They have a nice rounded corner, making them pleasing to the eye, and only cost about five cents each from Jeff Bezos’ Crazy Internet Emporium of Goods and More Goods.

Next comes the ground cover. A simple fine sand affixed with PVA glue (unthinned) holds both the sand and the figures in place. The material I use has a nice unsorted character, with the larger coral pieces making for nice big boulders to break up the green monotony.

This is old school basing, and very traditional. It’s traditional because it works, particularly at this scale where static grass just isn’t an option. Even the smallest grass would look like massive vines!

And finally comes the painting of the grass. Here you can see what each step looks like with the base color on the bottom row, a light green highlight, and then a very faint touch of mustard yellow to dull the contrast and give them a bright, summery feeling. The top row has a few boulders picked out in dark gray, if you can make them out.

With the fields in place, the red uniforms really jump right out, giving these British figures the characteristic color for which they earned the moniker “Redcoats”.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at a comparison of the three uniform colors done to date.