These photos show the results of my very first effort in painting 1:72 scale soldiers after taking a break for about 20 years. I had painted what I thought were my last plastic soldiers back in 1990/91 when I was stationed in Hawaii in the Army–right before I got married. I’ve since retired and seem to have a little more free time on my hands lately. So, last year around the holidays, after browsing the web and seeing how far this hobby has come, I went to the garage and started pulling out some of my old boxes of collected soldiers and started painting some figures again. I was glad that my two boy’s didn’t lose too many men during their years in command of my troops. I gathered up the ESCI FFL and Arab Warrior sets and went to work. Somehow, I had about 10 Airfix Legionnaires in the mix (even though I don’t ever remember owning a set) so I ordered a box of HäT/Airfix FFL reinforcements. I also ordered some HäT Early French figures to play with as well. You may spot some of them in the mix as well as a couple of Emhar French Infantry from the Crimean War painted up like the classic Legion.
This is the result. About 100 troops all together. I didn’t really have a clue what “the dip method” was and you can see that I made some horrible bases out of Scuplty clay before I learned about using pennies. They are OK for war games but I plan that one day I’ll paint another set and take more time with the process. I think my more recent efforts on the Dahomey figures in the previous post resulted in a better looking figures.
I’ll post the Arabs next.
