Army of the Potomac, taking shape

Busy, busy, busy!  I have been forging ahead with the large Union Army of 1/72 plastics, and thought I'd post some photos to show progress (apologies they're a little blurry, but I tried using my mobile camera, and it's not the best.)

 The above snap shows the whole horde at present - roughly somewhat over 200 soldiers.  I bought almost all of the figures from Italeri boxes, as I find these to be the best quality and also the easier to track down online.  I think I found one solitary box of Imex models on ebay, but that was the only difference.  

The mass above have been washed to clear off any moulding residue; clipped off the sprues; glued to card strips (from cut up cereal boxes, no less); spray-painted white with plastikote to prep them for painting, then sprayed back to Blue again (with Army Painter spray of Ultramarine.)  Since then I have been painting on an  industrial scale, painting all the trousers light blue, then all the shoes black, and now I'm about halfway through painting all the kepi visors/brims black as well.

There is only one, solitary figure that's complete at the moment.  This came about from me painting a lot of blue and black, and I creeped myself out that the figures would turn out awfully dark-looking en masse.  I finished one off experimentally, and I've reassured myself.  The remaining paint-work is almost all light-coloured (pink for the face & hands, light brown for the musket, and some silver/brass where needed, plus a light green base) so the overall model effect seems quite good.  I'm not splitting the whole collection up into batches, as I find I always slow down progress when one batch is done and I can't face starting another.  As a result, the painting at present is going 'monolithically' - so to speak.  The other day it was shoes, and nothing but.  Next weekend will hopefully be belts, and nothing else.  I'm keeping the focus on single elements so I can quickly bash through the lot, without stopping and re-doing bits here and there.  

In a departure from my normal method, I've also glues the figures onto strips together by pose - so there's no fiddling about to make sure I've got all the bits on varying models - if I pick up a card strip all the models are facing the same way, in the same position, so painting all the sides of a shoe or sword, for example, is very simple to do.  

There's also a fair bit of that appealing "detritus" of a model army in the process of assembling.  In this case, I have my Newline Designs officers to go (mounted on 2p coins) and also seven artillery pieces, plus a large caisson (from one of the Italeri Union Artillery boxes) which I have vague aims of using to decorate a little 'campsite' diorama for a supply-point.