Whilst for most of use who make custom minifigs the dream would be either Lego actually make military collections, or we can get our hands on some durable minifigs with custom decals, the reality is getting decent military themed minifigs is quite difficult, you need to really plan out what you want to acheive, since the Indiana Jones collection does have some Lego minifigs with a Military theme, and StarWars has a whole range of storm troopers, its not so difficult for sci-fi or WWII custom minifig makers. But if you’re hopeing to make something modern, get ready to do some serious hunting.

so Lets take a look a the themes that work for military vignettes:

Cowboys – Lego Cowboy theme

Knights and castles – Lego theme

WWII – Indiana Jones Russian and German soldier minifigs

Modern – Dino Attack (these are now out of production so you’re going to need to source these), Power Miners Lego themes.

Sci-fi – Lego Starwars theme.

You’ll find that in order to build up a large army of minifigs, you’ll either need to buy loads of sets of Lego, leaving you with plenty of potentially useless spare parts and costing you an arm and a leg, or, you’ll need to search on the second hand Lego community to find individual parts, in this instance you’ll need to potentially  buy the minifig in seperate parts, ie legs seperate from arms, torso seperate from head etc, this can add to the cost, but you’ll be able to get exactly what you need.

In other instances you might have designed a custom decal for your Lego minifigs, your best bet here is to source the lego minifig whos plastic is as close to the base colour you want, then, using brasso remove the existing decal and apply your own one instead, this might take longer and costa bit, but the results are supurb.