FACES, FLAGS & BASES
Facesflagsandbases.webnode.co.uk £5 upwards
There comes a point in your wargaming life where you work out that you are just not going to paint up all of the armies you’d want to before the inevitable... While I’m working on that‘immortality approach’ to address that issue, another way forward is to pay someone else to paint some (or all) of your troops for you.
But where do you go and how much should you pay? That’s a very individual question but I think I’d start with an outfit like Faces, Flags & Bases. A father and son team, they produce some nice models at what look to me to be very good prices indeed. They also cover a wide variety of periods (historical and non-historical) and aim to get orders completed in four weeks which – to me – sounds astonishing.
You could find most of this out from their website but I wanted to go into this in a bit more detail so I’ve set up an interview with Neil and Jamie to feature in a future issue
– hopefully the next one
– with a few more details. Meanwhile, what did they send in as an example of their work? Well the answer to that is a unit of Celts. They are a dozen figures which they have constructed from Victrix and Warlord, some straight from the box (bear in mind the flexibility of plastic figures) and some as ‘crossbreeds’between the two manufacturers. And – before I get to the actual paint jobs – the team are happy to assemble figures, but the costing is tricky: £10 plus minimum wage per hour for as long as it takes per box (though – as they said to me – putting together a 15mm
Flames of War tank can take two minutes, so the charge would be much less).
My dozen figures – two painted in
‘Fancy’ (£5.50 a figure) and the rest in
‘Standard’ (£5 each) came to £71.50 by the time they were based with sand and tufts and so forth.‘Fancy’includes details such as gold trim on a Druids cloak or Celtic plaid on trousers and shirt but a lot had shield decals and tattoos/war paint added and I’m very impressed. Painting uses layers rather than washes or dips and detail is crisp. I’ll let the pictures do the talking and look forward to the interview with the owners! Recommended.