Ogre Infantry Painting

I spent a few hours last night working on painting my Ogre infantry miniatures. I had painted a batch of them a long time ago, but had never been happy with the bases, which I had simply painted a couple of shades of green.  I was looking at them the other night in preparation for more infantry painting, and decided I hated the bases. They looked like the infantry were standing on a golf course. Not likely in the Ogre universe. Not impossible, but not likely. If they did fight on a golf course I doubt that Chem Lawn would have been out recently to spray for weeds anyway.

So I painted over all of the green bases with a light gray. Looking through my supply of terrain materials, I found a partial container of Woodland Scenics Fine Ballast, in light gray. Hmmmm.

After cleaning, basing, and painting the new batch of infantry, I painted their bases to match the originals. I let everything dry overnight. The next day I made up a 50% white glue (PVA) and 50% water mix and painted this mixture onto an infantry base with a small brush. I covered the entire base with the glue mixture, making sure to get right up to the figures' boots.

I poured a small amount of the ballast into a plastic cup and then set the infantry base into the ballast and shook it around to get full coverage. I left the stand there for a couple of minutes and then pulled it out, and shook off the excess ballast. After a couple of taps on the base with the handle of a hobby knife to dislodge any stray ballast bits, I set it aside to dry. This process was repeated for the remainder of the infantry stands. When I was finished, I moved the whole pile to a nearby table and let a  small fan blow on them overnight to speed the drying process.

Once they were dry I wet down the ballast with a thin black wash, to add depth and sort of glue everything together some more. Put them back in front of the fan to dry some more. Once they are dry they will get a spray of Dull Cote and that should finish up the Ogre infantry for the near future.

A couple of shots of my workbench here...