4th Rate Painting

 Am I referring to the quality of my paint job in the title, the miniature itself, or perhaps both...?

I finally finished the paint job for my 4th Rate ship for Oak and Iron. This was a nice model to paint, with a solid amount of detail. I held off for a while on painting this, partly to get my DBA Gauls finished (which I may have started to put off doing the 4th Rate), and partly because I was umming and ahhing over whether to go with a yellow 'gold' style decoration for the circular gun ports on this model. In the end I decided to just do it, painting the hull and surrounding details first, then the ports in white, and then finishing them in yellow, with highlights.

Overall I'm very happy with how the ship came out. In in previous post I commented that these models sort of sit between high quality board game pieces and table top miniatures. On reflection I think the ships have a solid level of detail, and given the scale, once painted, look really good on the table.

I'm sure there are better techniques out there, but I have quite liked the effect of doing the sails in a bleached bone tone, giving them a soft wash with a light brown tint, and then giving them a heavy dry brushing in vertical and horizontal strokes with bleached bone, then switching to a good sized stiff bristled flat brush, and more lightly dry brushing them with bleached bone, and then even lighter with white. Letting the second layer of bleached bone thicken and almost dry before applying it gives a good texture, and the white gives enough contrast to have what I think is a nice effect at a table level quality.

With the 4th Rate painted, that completes the base box, and the Men of War box, for 9 ships painted in total. I still have the Ships of the Line box, and Blackbeard's Revenge, but to be honest, I'm not sure I want to play games of a scale that can include Ships of the Line (at least yet), they look very difficult to handle without fielding ships of the same scale. It feels like the game might be best suited to a bunch of smaller ships and one or two men of war, but that is likely my inexperience with the game speaking.

I'm very pleased to have finally painted these, and have thoroughly enjoyed the few games I have played so far. I'm looking forward to getting a few more games of Oak and Iron under the belt.

Painting Oak and Iron

I've had Oak and Iron sitting on my shelf since I backed it when it was first on Kickstarter. As I've started to return to painting and playing miniatures games I was roundly infected with the desire to get this out, blow off the layer of dust, and see about painting the ships and playing the game.

Oak and Iron - First Edition Boxed Set

The ships are multi-part models, that push together. One part is the hull of the ship, and then all of the sails push into their little slots. This has the advantage of making the models easy to set up and play with - you could put them together straight after opening the box, and play it within a couple of minutes. With the hulls in brown plastic, and the sails in a white plastic, they look good enough for a sort of board game/miniatures game hybrid model.

Some of the models from the base game.

Whatever advantages are gained by making the ship models like this, the flip side is that they lack some refinement in terms of their detail. However, at the scale of the models, and how good they look once painted on the table, I don't think it really matters - they are table quality models, and a good paint job really does make them pop.

The base game box includes six ships, and I had to use the handy PDF on the Firelock Games website to help me work out which was the brigantine, and which was the frigate, and so on. I decided to work through the base box, hopefully play a game or two, and then decide whether to continue with the other couple of boxes I've got for the game.

I have played a couple of games now, and I started on the Men of War box (includes 3 more ship models). Two of these are painted in the photos below. I'll review the game another day, but for now, here are all the painted ships...

The first model I painted was the sloop...

The Brigantine and the Corvette were next

Brigantine

Corvette

The Fluyt

The Petite Fregate

The Light Galleon

All six ships from the core box

The 6th Rate, from the 'Men of War' box

The 5th Rate, from the 'Men of War' box

Oak and Iron ships on my sea board, and with some terrain I had originally built for Dystopian Wars: