Collins Does Afghanistan 2013-2014

I didn’t take pictures of the steps for each man. I simply batch painted the lot.

I also painted a lot of Taliban in quick succession too. Their paint scheme was mostly tans and bland colours until I did a bit of a google search for Afghan civilians and discovered that there are a lot of pictures of brightly coloured clothing too.

I remember hearing about the Taliban exploiting poor locals and playing them $10 to take up arms for the day and go attack ISAF. Whether this was a regular occurrence I don’t know but I decided to put some colourful clothing into the ranks to represent these ‘ten dollar tali’s’

The weapon options for the range are good for such a small range at the moment.

The Taliban come sporting:

• AK-47
• PKM
• RPG
• SVD
• Double Barrelled Shotgun
• Revolver

The British return fire with:

• SA-80
• SA-80UGL
• MiniMi
• GPMG
• L129A1
• Combat Shotgun
• Glock

There is plenty there on both sides to have a good scrap.

On OTT we all got together and found a way to go about it.

You’ll need the following paints

• Baneblade Brown
• Nurgling Green
• Gorthor Brown
• Dryad Bark
• Waagh Green
• Flayed One Flesh
• Athonian Camoshade
• Nuln Oil

It’s at this stage that the pattern comes to life. The key part of the scheme that’s recognisable is the off white colour. But its still really harsh and needs binding together.

• A very light wash of Athonian Camoshade (perhaps more a glaze)
• Then you have to manually go in and pin wash areas with Nuln Oil to highlight things like pockets, body armour overlaps, helmet nets etc.

If you look at the leg pockets helmet detail and the ‘battle nappy’ body armour section you can see the pin-wash is an absolutely key part of the process.

It breaks up the overall view down into its different sections, I guess this is the ‘breaking the camouflage’ that you always hear about.

So painting camo was never my strong point. I have usually shied away from it because I don’t understand how to do it or give it some depth. I’ve seen some people do amazing work with things like SS oakleaf or peadot camo and though, ‘man, I wish I could do that’ and completely disheartened to hear ‘oh its easy, you just do xyz, blah blah blah, thingy whatsit and then bam, you’re done’.

Multicam is the same, its so many different shades of colour and there are actually a large number of variations. Only one true Multicam and then a lot of similar knockoffs that people use when they don’t want to pay for the license, for example, the British who made MTP instead which is based on Multicam. They do still appear to use a lot of licensed Multicam however

Now when I first painted the first model from this range I followed this guide.

I felt that the result came out far too green! other OTTers agreed with me too. so on we went to find another way! thankfully the painting god/demon/powerhouse suetoniuspaullinus was on hand to guide us all through it all. more on that later.

I have not tried this method as it was released after I painted my models and chose my colour scheme with the OTTers.

Please try it though as its much nicer browner colour than the spectre green Multicam scheme.

I saw the miniatures from White Dragon Miniatures at Salute a few years ago and thought, ‘Hmm, they’re cool’ but didn’t know anything about modern wargaming or even a conflict that has happened in my lifetime where had I chosen to, could have been part of and as they say, nobody almost joined up. But what I did do is almost drop my whole salute budget on some models that I didn’t need, knew nothing about and didn’t even know the options for games out there.

My period of history interest had always been WW2, carried out a lot of research into it for my other hobby and I’ve got a couple of forces for Bolt Action or rather Chain of Command as I feel it suits what I want out of a game a bit more.

This new model problem left me with some conundrums to solve

1. find a game
2. find some terrain
3. paint the models
4. multicam…shit…how do i paint that!?!?!
5. find some cool reference photos for all the above

Now I have no idea if those images are actually from Afghan or even the time period I’m in with the models but still, im guessing yes? ish?

I got the from the Ministry of Defence photo gallery