After painting some 200 28mm Ancients, the 10mm are a little simple, while I love the look of massed ACW figures, the painting is very mechanical, asebly line stuff, fill in the colors, ad some easy highlights, And I do 30 at a time, it left me a little cold.
Then I rememberd I had like 100+ 40mm ACW, they were for another project that is now dead. But I still have them.
So I thought it was a fun idea to just paint some of them, and really putting in the effort, not havin to think about "oh I have to finish so and so many figures, I have to hurry" ect.
This is painting for painting sake, not having to finish to finish, there is no goal, I'll just paint, and one day, I might have enough to do a small skirmish game. But the game is not the goal, it's simply iceing on the kake, the goal is to paint something VERY WELL.
To do this I only paint two figures at a time, I did two so I can paint two diffrenct poses at the same time, it also lets me paint one figure while the other dries, if I only painted one, I would have to stop up all the time, while waiting for the paint jo dry.
When I did this I made the consius choice to paint the union jackets in a lighter color then what is historic. I did this for one reason and one reason only, it's more rewarding to paint, when you paint very dark blue, alot of the effort you put in, gets lost, it's very hard to spot all the details on dark blue paint, So you might spend 2 hours painting 5 layers of diffrent dark blue, and in the end, most of the effort won't show up.
It's much easier to get a good looking paint job on mid or light blue, in the ned, the resault was mixed.
So here's the figures, I'm 95% happy with them, I went all out with this, almost everything has 3 or more layers. Trousers got 4 layers, jackets got 3 layers, kepi got 3 layers, blanket got 4 layers, face got 3 layers and one layer of wash, musket stock got 3 layers, hair got 3 layers.
The only things that got only two layers is leather, musket metal and shoes.
It's EASLY my very very very best paint job EVAH, but why only 95% happy?
Well the jacket is to light, I said I was going to paint them light, but the jacket is to close to the trousers in color. The problem was simply lack of a shade. You see I found a great base coat, it was just dark enough to use as shade, but then I missed a shade, I have like 8 differnt blues, but still I was missing a mid shade, so I had to use a lighter color then I wanted, which left the whole jacket to light. it still looks good, but the diffrence between the jacket and trousers is to small.
The musket got 3 wood colors, and two metal colors, it got gun metal base with chain mail highlights.
I'm very happy with the faces, first a dark flesh, then a flesh wash, then I did the eyes, then a main mid color flesh and finnaly a very light highlight flesh.
The S&S faces ae great, so much character, and very easy to paint.
So this was very fun to paint, except for the jackets lightness I'm extremly happy with these.
1 comment:
If the jacket and trousers are too much the same color, maybe apply a dark blue wash to either to change the color just enough.
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