Detailing my tiny desert übermensch

I kept painting my poor miniature men without any real break. The coats looked a bit dull as they were so I drybrushed them with a bit of Iraqui Sand that I used to paint the trousers. With a single flat colour those things end up boring so drybrushing brings out the highlights pretty nicely. But why am I rambling about these things? Back to business!

The last time I left the skin areas of my mininazis chocolate brown, now I painted them liberally with Vallejo's Medium Skin Tone so that the deepest recesses still had some chocobrown to give a sense of shadows. Then, after a while of drying, I highlighted parts like noses, chins, cheekbones, ears and fingers with Vallejo Dark Skin. For some cosmical reason that dark skin is actually lighter than medium skin tone.. but I guess they're just from a slightly different palette. In any case, they finally started looking like people.

The next evening I spent with the coats and accessories. My main theme was painting belts, bayonettes and other decorative elements. Belts got a Chocolate Brown coating, except the straps for the water bottle and ... whatever that small box is on the back of two guys. Those got a grey-black strap, just to give some kind of a variety to the setup. All the belt- and strap buckles I highlighted with metal colour and later I'll wash them a bit to tune the shininess down a bit. Then I painted the shoulder flaps with green, as these are plain old infantry. Those things got a thin white lining and the man holding the binoculars got a dot on the thingie, he was supposed to be a Fährnrich (a second lieutenant), but I made it to a wrong place... should've checked before doing. Guess I'll paint another and give him a promotion to a lieutenant, so he'll be accurate again.

Somehow I also dared to have a go at the eyeballs and irises of these tiny people. Thanks to a paintbrush set that I got a couple of years ago, especially the three-hair 5|0 detail brush, everything went awesomely without causing a mess or swearing. I could almost get excited about this.

And indeed I got excited. I kept on my sick attempt of adding minute details by freehanding tiny shields to the helmets. One side should have a silver nazi eagle on a black shield and the other one is a black/red shield with a narrow diagonal white stripe going through it. And it ended being acceptable at least:

After everything got dry, I put the helmets on their owners and tried how they could be posing when the whole thing is done. A couple of those guns are going to cause some trouble, I may even have to tear some arms off their sockets like a mad Wookiee...