Photos of Mainforce 6mm Modern Infantry (and some T90s)

Painting 1980's Cammo on 1/300th scale figures

Mainforce is a range of 1:285 figures, mainly in lying down poses and covering WW2 covering British, German, Russian and US and for Moderns, British, West German, Russian, Canadian, Afghan, French, Israeli, Iranian, US and Vietnamese. They are sold in the UK by Magister Militum as a compliment to their GHQ 1:285 ranges.

There is lot's more of this stuff on my Links Page

I have already painted a load of these in desert cammo, so now I wanted to paint some for myself to go with my Brits - this is the contents of one bag of figures, plus some GHQ T90's.

The GHQ figures have their usual ridiculous levels of detail

Every rivet on the T90 is visible - The T-90 is a Russian third-generation main battle tank that is essentially a modernisation of the T-72B, incorporating many features of the T-80U (it was originally to be called the T-72BU, later renamed to T-90). It is currently the most modern tank in service with the Russian Ground Forces and Naval Infantry. Although a development of the T-72, the T-90 uses a 125mm 2A46 smoothbore tank gun, 1G46 gunner sights, a new engine, and thermal sights

The base this is sat on is 20mm x 40mm. It is card and magnabase, topped with a fine sand and then sprayed Matt Dark Earth, and drybrushed with bleached bone and a pale grey.

At some point I might add some colour for IR lights or something

Starting off, the infantry were all superglued onto magnetic sheet - this was both to make the bases thicker, and to allow them to be magnabased for transport and storage. Thicker bases are easier to pick up - and the magnabase might even be less damaging if they break loose and start to dent each other

After the base coat had dried, a bit of light drybrishing with bleached bone and then pale grey - to match the tank bases - and then I started by semi-carefully painting each infantryman in a dark sand colour, as the base for the 1980's British DPM cammo

I then "damp-brushed" them with cammo green, then a dark chocolatey brown, then a final set of stripes of the green again (as the brown ended up too obvious, especially on the helmets)

The guns were picked out in black, with the Milan teams and infantry AT weapons in a Dark Green, with some yellow stripes for effect (I know yellow stripes probably mean disarmed training weapons, but you need some highlights on these tiny figures to stop them just being blobs)

The flesh tone was deliberately a very pale Vallejo Pale Flesh - agains I wanted it to stand out to make the figures look more interesting

I almost forgot the boots, and thinking that black might be a bit too strong I ended up doing them all in Miniature Paints Dark Earth.

A few small spots of glue allowed me to add some static grass. This is probably a bit long for the scale (!) but it's what I have, so its what I used.

This shows the depth of the bases with the layer of magnabase added in

You can also see how the light coloured flesh tone makes them look a bit more interesting

They also create their own really neat storage solution, if you keep them on some metalized card

Here's what they look like at way larger than life size

Not bad for half a days work !

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That's the end - so why not go back to the Links Page and browse through some more stuff

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