The Bolt Action British army starter at first glance is pretty standard for an army starter box comparable any other system. There is a full platoon (three squads plus some smaller elements), a vehicle, and a variety of support elements (AT gun, mortar, and a HMG). So for what you pay, about $100-$150, you get a bit more than your usual army starter box, which I find tend to be a special character, one or two squads and a larger creature or vehicle. So in terms of raw bodies on the field you get a a lot of plastic. In terms of quality of the individual model they are fairly mediocre and soft in detail, but the quantity you get does make up for it somewhat. They are fully poseable, you get a load of additional bits and pieces, additional kit and detailing which is good for a purchase of this volume. You will certainly come out of your build with a load surplus bits and pieces.
I'm not sure I'd call it a problem, but many of the weapons are quite delicate and easy to break, which makes the surplus of bits and pieces, especially for weapons, ideal. The upside to this does mean that the weapons are realistically scaled to the person.
In terms of paint job these guys were pretty much built for batch painting. I've already wrote a detailed guide for how I batched out the infantry, you can find it here. The vehicles themselves were done using a method that I was experimenting with for bulking large amounts of 15mm armour. I will go into further detail on this in a future article where I will discuss and walk through the process for combining airbrush pre-shading with enamel based products to get a quick and easy way of painting armour. In terms of my feelings about this process, as usual, batch work is hard and takes personal discipline to follow through with. The real slog with this process, as always, is the base coating. Vallejo paints, when thinned property typically take three layers to get an even layer. When applied to the entirety of the batch this rapidly adds up in terms of working time. The majority colour, Vallejo English Uniform for the uniform jacket and trousers in this case, I did with the air brush, which cut working time down significantly. Once that was done the rest of the details were done with brush by hand, which is where the real cost in terms labour lie. Once all the base coating was done the next stage was washing with a mid tone shade. Easy enough to do, but a I overdid it on a few of the miniatures. The re-layering was the next longest phase, re-applying the relevant colours over the washed areas. Once that is done the highlights were comparatively simple and quick to complete. After that all that remained were minor details like eyes and that is it.
Overall this project is a slog, and I'm definitely hesitant to start another large project like this and attempt to do it in one solid pass. Instead I'm going to break up large projects by a couple of units at a time, because nothing makes painting feel more like work than the lack of variety in a project. In terms of painting similar projects, I will be attempting to repeat this process with 15mm Battlefront miniatures in order to rejuvenate my Flames of War late war British.
