Why
Irregular Miniatures have an impressive range of miniatures. Although the looks of the miniatures never attracted me, I enjoyed some of the designs and some miniatures of vehicles hard to find at other manufacturers. When the time was right, I had the pleasure of buying some of the miniatures focusing on the 6mm Modern miniatures range
How
The miniatures are from
metal, they are 1:300 in scale, sometimes 1:285, sometimes bigger. The
miniatures were assembled, generally not too much work since mostly required a simple glue to fix the turret to the hull. Then they were cleaned (not that big of a deal), washed with liquid soap, primed with Nato Green Vallejo
Primer and painted. One coat of paint was applied on the top and sides of the miniature,
one coat on the bottom of miniature, and another on the top and sides of the
miniature again. Then the tracks were painted or wheels, if it was the case,
and details were painted, drybrushing, washing, highlighting, correcting
mistakes, mixing and matching. It was fun, I will come back to do a repaint to the miniatures some time in the future, maybe so that I can cover some of the casting faults from Irregular Miniatures.
Rarely,
some of the miniatures had some casting problems or they
arrived with the barrel of the gun from a tank broken (to arrive with a
bent
gun is something, in general, understandable, at least at this scale).
How can
you fix this? There are many methods presented on different sites. I
simply use
a part of the brush to elevate the gun, and carefully, with another one,
point
it in the desired/right direction, and this done after the painting was
finished, at least before some last minute highlights, to avoid to
repeat the
procedure and eventually broke it. Or you can use the side of the blade of a cutter and you finger or tweezers.
Results
So, as we have seen,
with good and bad parts, but with many good memories and a fast work, many miniatures were painted and photographed. Then they were cataloged. Finally, a gallery of images and series of texts and a web
of links was assembled. I was not able to identify the miniatures (unless embarrasing obviously, like desert infantry and the rest...) of the infantry, so I basically painted them in one paint scheme if they were from desert and other arid environments and the rest of the world. And then, this review came. Hope you like it, as my
next thoughts, the actual review, comes in the next paragraphs.
Review
The 6mm Modern range of miniatures from Irregular Miniatures is not that big, numbering a little more than 50 miniatures, not counting infantry. In this range we can find tanks, armoured cars, few trucks and some special vehicles ("Bloodhound surface-to-air missile, launch pad, trailer and land rover" or "Scud (A) Missile on tracked launcher") and infantry. The last type of miniatures, infantry is very hard to be identified because the website of the manufacturer does not have images for all their products. This is of course a bad conduit for alost all other manufacturers of the market, hence the reason for doing this gallery of images and at the same time a review. In terms of manufacturers/origin of vehicles, the range of miniatures can be easily expanded (think of French and German vehicles present in this range of miniatures, for instance, and you get the point). Hopefully it will be developed in the future.
The miniatures have
more weight than similar 6mm miniatures and this may be a consequence
of the important quantity of lead used (a thing of the past, generally,
since today hard plastic or white lead are more used than before). They glue easily and paint fast with not too many things that need to be removed from the actual miniatures (" the flesh").
In terms of quality and details the miniatures are not that good. Sometimes, they look like caricatures of the real vehicles and not miniatures in scale of them (S-tank). Some of the names of the miniatures are mispelled ("Abrahams" instead of "Abrams"; if you look at WW2 range you can also find out some curious names like "Saharina" instead of "Sahariana"). The paint job applied to these miniatures needs to hide some of the faults of the casts and I have also some work to do at this chapter. In terms of designs, some of the miniatures are good, but as written, the poor level of details and a little out of 1:300 scale, ruin the miniatures.
If you look at other ranges of miniatures, you realize that these are characteristics of the manufacturer (I respect its work and how much care was invested to hold in production so many miniatures across different eras - Ancient to science fiction - and scales/heights - from 2mm to 75mm -). In the last two decades, things improved a lot, in terms of variety of manufacturers of miniatures and their quality, but I can see Irregular Miniatures still holding a special place for some of the hobbyists around the world, though without significant improvements on the details of the miniatures things do not look that bright (of course, this is my opinion).
I may buy in the future other miniatures from Irregular Miniatures, but until then I am happy with what I got. Some of the miniatures look so bad that I think I will use them in some of my wargames as not well done RUSE for enemy or training ground targets for my army. For others I will surely find a nice place to fit my collection, though few are in this situation.
Feedback
Hope you like it, hope you share it with many friends and leave a comment or two!
Click on the links to access the
galleries of the ranges of miniatures, totaling 50+ miniatures and hundreds of corresponding images.
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I was going to use their 6mm WW1 range till I looked at them. There are not too many options at that scale other than them, so I bumped it up to 10mm. 6mm can be affordable and look nice too, these just don't. Their 15mm stuff is just fine though.
ReplyDeleteYes, they don't look that great, I was dissapointed, too. But thanks for the tip with their 15mm, I will have a look!
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