Teaching myself to paint

I'm teaching myself to paint. For over a year now, I've been paining figs, I have improved some, but I have never realy tried to improve my general technique. But now I will.

This is a 40mm Perry French, I've kinda decided not to game 40mm, and I'm going to do skirmish in 28mm instead, now that perry and vitrix is out with plastics. BUT I do have sevral 40mm figs, and thought they would be perfect trying to work on my technique.

There are sevral things I did for the first time on this fig that I never have done.

The first and most obiouvs is layaring, I painted the trousrs light gray, then white over letting the "dimples" stay grey. This left a kinda drastic diffrence between the colors, mabye to much for my taste, but I know some people like it, and it does make it seem more animated, and it's deffenatly an improvemnet over nothing at all.

The second thing I did was highlighting with lighter color. I did this especaly on the napsack with lighter tones of brown on sides of it. Both to highlight and to make it seem more worn.

As you can se very drastic between the grey and wihte, but as I said some people like it that way, and I have seen many figs painted this was(only better)

I took me about 1 hour 20 minutes to paint it. Which is ALOT when you consider that I have painted 12 28mm WW2 figs in 45 minutes, and at my normal pace I paint 6 15mm figs fearly well in 40 minutes. BUT I realy did enjoy painting it. Taking my time, going over it sevral times with paints if I had even the smalles inperfection, tho I'm sure you'll find mistakes with your highly trained eyes.