My Return to Painting with Warlord’s Epic Black Powder

By Mitch Reed

I have been hiding a secret from many of you, over the last three years I have not been painting. I have mentioned this on podcasts numerous times and if you ran into me at an LGS or a convention, I probably told you bluntly, “I have not painted in years.” I have no idea what caused this, perhaps from playing too many board games? Could it be that I have all the painted models I need to play the games I love?

No matter the cause, the passion was gone, however recently my passion returned, and the flame was relit.

I do not recall the day I stopped painting. I would say that it was in the first part of 2020. While many gamers caught up on their unpainted models, I did not have all that much, the only project I was working on in mid-2020 was a force for Test of Honor. I recall pushing myself to finish the models, but I could not bring myself to stick with the project.

This happened before. Many years ago I took 18 months off from painting, however, new games came out and I returned to my painting room with a passion, so I felt this was a temporary situation.

What I thought would fix the situation was getting Warlord’s Epic Black Powder American Civil War starter kit. I have played a few ACW games, however, I did not own any models and when the deals for the starter kit came out it was perfect for me to get into this period. Others who also got into the initial pre-sale know how big that box was and how many models it had.

I pushed myself to prime both the Iron Brigade and Zouave figures and started on the Iron Brigade, I block-painted them, and then, nothing. There they sat, gathering dust for about three years. In 2022 I had my Warlord Games BFF Jon Russell stay at my place, and his guest quarters were right next to my painting room. I pointed to the Epic ACW kit, which was about knee-high, and blamed him. Jon returned a year later, and the pile had not moved.

I was stuck and other than the small, quick, and easy paint job for the game Lunar, I had no desire to paint anything else. Kickstarter projects just added to my pile, but nothing motivated me to get back into it. At the 2023 Historicon, I picked up some starter kits for By Fire and Sword, hoping this would get me back into painting.

A few weeks after Historicon, for some unknown reason, I forced myself back to the painting table, and while I started slowly, I soon found myself addicted to it with drive and purpose.

I quickly finished the Iron Brigade, then the Zouaves. And before I knew it, I was deep into the project. I wish I could say that the motivation was to play Black Powder; maybe in some small way, it was. Or, just the fact that by finishing this project I could move on to other games like Blood & Crowns. No matter what, the pile was shrinking, and my armies began to take shape.

I was worried that my negligible painting skills (Note: I am the worst painter at NDNG) atrophied during my hiatus, but it was like riding a bicycle and I was soon in a painting groove. I made some operational decisions, the biggest was not field five stand regiments. I made this one well before I started my project, and it was a simple decision. The unit frontage of the 5 stands is equal to the frontage of the 28mm game and therefore not as “epic”. I decided to use three stand regiments and I picked up extra command strips to get more regiments in the game.

I found that using a painting system made the project go quicker, and looked for speed over accuracy.

When painting the rebels I wanted all of the regiments to have that rag-tag look of each soldier having a different mix of uniforms. While many of my stands are mixed, some of them have the same tops and the same pants. Uniform tops were either grey (French Mirage Blue) or Butternut (English Uniform or other browns), with the paints being the same colors and mixing it up with Andrea Blue.

Few of my stands have the tops and bottoms of a single color. I also used different browns or black for the hats and a variety of colors for the bedrolls. I found these more time-consuming to paint due to the different colors.

However, the Federal stands are all Dark Prussian Blue with Andrea Blue pants. The hats were either dark blue or black, and for both, the webbing was black. On only a few occasions early on did I paint the boots. I took the first few Iron Brigade models all the way through the process of basing and realized that you cannot see the boots, so I saved some time.

Once I finished the infantry, I knocked out all the cannons which were easy to paint. Then off to the leaders and the final project was the cavalry. Since the ACW is not known for its massed cavalry charges I kept with the 3-stand concept and made 3 regiments of cavalry each.

In the end, this is what I ended up with per army.
25 regiments of infantry
3 regiments of cavalry with equal numbers of cavalry skirmishers
15 cannons
12 leaders

When it came to the infantry skirmishers, I looked at them being more of a status token. I only did eight rebel and nine federal, I painted three of these in green uniforms in case I wanted to play them as a regiment of Berdan’s Sharpshooters. I also found some packs of riderless horses that I will use as tokens to denote a limbered artillery battery.

Doing some quick math, this comes out to about 3,375 soldiers I had to paint. From start to finish it took me 61 days, which included basing and flocking. I also built 4 of the wooden structures that that set came with. I did not build the Gettysburg Seminary or the cemetery gates. These are huge projects that would be great if every game I play is about Gettysburg since they are so iconic. I may revisit them and build them in the future.

While this project picked up steam, I also got a 6’x4’ neoprene mat, some 15mm appropriate trees, and a few resin houses. I did an inventory of what 15mm terrain or 28mm terrain I already had that I could use and had well more than I would need to play a game of Epic Black Powder. I also cleaned out a store of plastic containers in order to store the many models when I am not using them.

When I finished the project, I did feel some sense of accomplishment. The huge pile of Epic ACW was gone, now stored away, ready for use. I do not know what caused my painting pause, and it is even more than a mystery as to what motivated me to get back at the table. Perhaps I will never know and with that thinking, I am sure I will go into another painting dry spell again in the future.

However, I will know that such pauses happen and that it is just temporary. Or I want the believe that it will be.

If I were to guess what the biggest driver of my non-painting period was would be the sheer size of the Epic ACW project. With many games, you get that starter force and then one day you wake up with tons of miniatures for that game. Perhaps getting all the miniatures needed to play Epic ACW in one shot was not a good motivator. The pile of unpainted Epic ACW seemed like a mountain, one which I felt I could easily avoid.

Over the two months of this project, I felt motivated each day to get back to the table. After two weeks, I was almost addicted to finding time each day to paint. Once again, I realized how relaxing and enjoyable painting was and while the paint may dry up, your skills do not.

This story does not have a real ending, it was more about my three-year journey if anything. Sometime I will play a game using the Black Powder rules, and I will post pictures when that happens. As I now have a clear painting table, I need to see what I will paint next. I have a feeling it will be the four boxes of miniatures I recently bought to play Blood & Crowns.