15 mm ACW Confederate Infantry (Pre-Basing)

I don't normally do work in progress posts; partly because I find photographing miniatures a right royal pain in the bum.  This time I'm going to make an exception to share this newly painted unit before I base it whilst trying a black background for my photography:

In painting these I wanted to:

• Experiment with a mainly grey/brown colour palette to see how much variety I could introduce.  The browns were easy.  Varying the grey was hard.  There're only really three shades in this batch.
  
• Make little or no use of metallics, even though the bayonets would have been very bright in reality. I thought it might "unbalance" the figures.
• Work out which colours I could reasonably, and historically, use for emphasis with the main grey/brown scheme.  I ended up using a muted red, light brown (orange), with taupe & sand.
  

The figures are based on 30 by 20 mm MDF bases as the standard Fire & Fury basing is just far too cramped.  I was amazed what difference 5 mm made.  

I haven't started the groundwork yet because I want to use a new basing scheme and I'm waiting for a new batch of tufts to arrive.  This is my test piece:

As a photography experiment the above images are only average (at best) and I will be reverting to a white background once I've finished basing the unit.

Figures used
All the figures are from Warrior in Scotland whose customer service is first class.  The images below are taken from their excellent gallery.   

The rank and file stands are made up of three codes (AC5, 8, 15) which Warrior sell in single pose packs of 12:

The command stand is the Confederate Foot Command (AC20) which contains two of each of the three figures below:

The figures are true 15 mm scale and they are well cast with hardly any flash or mould lines.  The smaller size makes painting the facial detail and fingers a challenge but the detail is in the castings and they repay any extra time spent.

Finally, the flags are available free from this post.