Posts, articles and links mostly concerning the painting of miniatures. Lead Painters League posts, links to resources and inspiration elsewhere, and such.
Even more chaotic than usual as I prep for Trumpeter Salute 2013 this coming weekend!
Protected car festooned with Bolshie flags, and other random clutter!
The centrepiece is, of course, the sandbag-and-rail tie flatcar that will be one of the centrepieces of my Russian Civil War game. I got the sandbags to a satisfactory paint job, and if I have some extra time before Friday I’ll do one last round of drybrushing and weathering on the whole car. I can’t really call it an “armoured” train car, so I’ve been referring to it as the “sandbag car” or a “protected railcar”. Anyway, it looks good, especially with some red Bolshie flags hanging off it to proclaim it’s current owners to the world.
The US Navy gunboat sailors crowded around the back of the railcar are part of my “Well, I’m painting, might as well paint something else” drive. They’ve sat on my painting bench for a terribly long time — you can see them in the blurry background of quite a number of previous workbench photos on this blog… a bit of extra paint moves them slightly closer to being done, at least!
The six extra Russian cavalry (Brigade Games Cossack figures, to be precise) are also coming along nicely. That’s the Cossack horses in amongst the sailors there.
Three days until Trumpeter! (although I only really have Wednesday evening to myself, with other commitments Thursday then off to Vancouver Friday… yikes…)
I’d heard of “wet palette painting” before, but for no particular reason hadn’t sought out information on the technique or looked into it at all. Then a few nights ago I was rummaging around among YouTube’s wargaming-related videos, as one does, and this wet palette howto video from Corvus Miniatures caught my attention.
Turns out to be pretty straightforward – an old container lid from the recycling bin, paper towel, water, baking parchment. We had all those things knocking around the kitchen, so I set up a wet palette and tried it out while doing the main blocking colours on six Cossack horses from Brigade Games and a swamp-monster thing from Reaper.
Compared to the dry palette I’m used to (an old CD!) you get hugely extended working time with your paints, which is especially useful when you’re block-coating six 28mm horses and a highly textured monster. I forsee fewer sad little blobs of half-dry unusable paint in my future! Blending is also easier, which is nice when you want slight variations to make your horses (or whatever else) look more interesting.
A quick look at my painting bench as a I get ready for Saturday’s Russian Civil War game at GottaCon. On the right, 15 Bolsheviks, a mix of regulars and militia/Red Guard types. Behind them across the back of the cutting matt, a unit of Russian horse. Behind them and currently being ignored, 10 American gunboat sailors from Pulp Figures. On the left of the mat, 14 Bolshevik sailors. Off the mat to the left, a batch of finished Whites from ages ago just waiting to be re-housed as I (yet again) reorganize my figure storage. Centre, a field gun — the crew are lurking behind the Red sailors. The CD has some new greenstuff banners I just primed, and a small pile of ready ammo that will form part of a loaded/unloaded marker for the field gun.
All sorts of things, mostly Russians, being painted. See text for details, and click for larger!
In other convention-related news, I’ve submitted my RCW game to Trumpeter Salute; haven’t had the event confirmed by the organizers yet but it’s nice to have it submitted.
Right, back to the painting mines! Four days to the game!
It seems “what colours do you use for WW1 Russian uniforms?” is one of those things that comes up again and again. I’ve been painting an awful lot of Russians (of various WW1/Russian Civil War flavours!) for a year or two now, and I’ve been asked for painting recipes in email, in comments here, and on forums. It’s time to do something I should have done months ago – write a flippin’ blog post that I can link people to, to save myself the trouble of typing the same thing out again and again…
I paint with Reaper Master Series paints, largely because they’re carried by my FLGS and the price point (especially when you buy in Triad sets) is better than GW or Vallejo. Reaper has this awesome web-gadget called the Power Palette that you can fire an image in, then extract the closest Master Series colours from. I scanned a couple of images from the Osprey Publishing RCW books and got the Power Palette to suggest a list of colours for me.
A Russian Civil War Bolshevik infantry force.
I’ll add better shots of my painted figures eventually, but here’s my basic World War One/Russian Civil War Russian uniform recipe, all paints Reaper Master Series unless stated otherwise.
For all figures: Base: Khaki Shadow Wash: GW Devlan Mud (note that this is now out of production (thanks, geniuses at GW…) so I’ll eventually have to find an alternative…) First highlight back up with straight Khaki Shadow.
My Reds get a much darker Devlan Mud wash, the Khaki Shadow highlight, and that’s pretty much it.
My Whites get another round of highlighting with Terran Khaki. Officers in especially spiffy uniforms get a final highlight with Khaki Highlight.
Some Russian uniforms seem to have darker, greener trousers; I use Military Green as a base there, sometimes just as a wash over Khaki Shadow.
The Russian uniform procurement process, even before the Civil War started, was known to produce quite a bit of variation in what was nominally the same colour of cloth. I use Bone Shadow and Polished Bone as alternate base colours, especially in the Red forces. For the Reds, I also use a lot of other random colours – other greens, browns and greys especially, as the early RCW Red Guard/Red Army had enormous trouble (even by the usual Russian standards, which is saying something!) keeping anything like an actual “uniform” appearance!
The Whites had equal trouble at various stages, but I keep my Whites in neater trim than my Reds, purely so the two forces can be told apart on the tabletop!
For Cossack blue trousers, Soft Blue base. I need to rediscover what I highlight Soft Blue with, I appear not to have written it down in my painting notes… I also have no photos at all of my Cossack infantry plaston, which is a shame.
Red Sailors! See below for painting notes.
For Red Sailors, Worn Navy for blue base, Leather White for white base, Pure Black for black, Khaki Shadow (again) for khaki/green. Kerchiefs are Sapphire Blue.
The Worn Navy gets a very thin wash of 1:1 Worn Navy:Pure Black for shadows, then highlighted back with Worn Navy and Soft Blue. Pure Black coats get a highlight of 1:1 Walnut Brown:Pure Black. Leather White gets a Pure White highlight. The white stripes on hats and kerchiefs is actually a 1:1 Leather White:Pure White mix.
I’m probably going to go back into my entire batch of Red Sailors and do another round of highlighting on the blue clothing, it’s a bit bland currently. More Soft Blue, maybe with one further brighter highlight.
Hope this helps, I’ll add better photos as I take them!
“A Horse of a Different Colour” is nine parts long, and goes into fascinating detail about how horses get the colours they do, as well as how to paint the beasts! Part One is an introduction; Part Two talks about markings, white and otherwise, and oddities like the “bloody-shouldered grey” horse. The whole series can be found in reverse order under the horse of a different colour tag over at Trouble. Finally Part Nine is entirely on painting horses, using the stuff discussed previously to get good, interesting horses.
And yes, my renewed interest in painting horseflesh is because there’s more RCW Cossacks on the painting table, as well as a unit of Cuirassiers for my long-neglected English Civil War/Thirty Year’s War army!
Part of the reason I haven’t done much painting in the last several months has been the frankly depressing state of my painting bench. It had progressed beyond cluttered to “under there somewhere”, and when sitting down to paint would involve first moving crap out of the way with a shovel, one naturally loses the inclination to attempt any painting…
So this evening I bit the bullet, actually did take a shovel to the bench, then sat down to reclaim some space from my ever-increasing collection of paints. There are all sorts of great paint racks and storage systems out there (this fairly recent system from Back2Bas-ixs, for example) but they all cost more than I want to spend; my wargaming budget isn’t huge and I’d much rather spend that on figures, rules and scenery! So I grabbed a shoebox lid, some extra scrap card from another box, and a roll of masking tape, and set about building a functional mockup of a paint rack.
Here it is, in all it’s cardboard glory: Workbench with new paint shelf, October 28 2012.
The first thing I realized is that I’ll need at least one more that size to get my existing collection of paints fully up off the bench itself, but this is a start! The shelves are box cardboard slightly heaver than the card the shoebox is made of, and there’s a cardboard “toe” at the lower edge to keep it propped against the wall at a slight backwards angle to keep everything on the shelves. It holds 24 Reaper dropper bottles (the same size used by Vallejo or Foundry) and the two lowest shelves hold 10-12 GW/Tamiya-sized jars.
I’m calling it a mockup because one of the things I want to build is a much larger shelf/rack system that goes across the whole back edge of my painting bench, with lots of shelving for paints, inks, tools and in-progress figures. I can get thin acrylic sheet (ie plexiglass) fairly cheaply from a local plastic supply shop, so part of the reason for this quick-and-dirty shoebox shelf is to see what sort of proportions that project will have. (just for scale, the cutting mat at front centre of my bench is a 12″x9″ model.)
In the meantime, I’m going to scare up a second shoebox lid and bodge together another quick-and-dirty paint shelf for the rest of my paints and inks!
I’ve had a bit of a slowdown in painting and general wargaming involvement lately; partly this is because I haven’t had a game of anything in ages, and partly it’s been down to my painting bench being a horrifying clutter of finished models, scrap and offcuts left over from scenery projects, real-life clutter like spare sunglasses, and general disarray… so this evening I sat down to get it all sorted out.
The finished figures went into cases finally, then I cleared one section of the desk at a time, ruthlessly threw away all the garbage (even most of the offcut bits that “might be useful one day”..) and imposed some order on the place.
My painting and scenery desk, cleaner and more organized than it's been in ages!
A quick tour, from the left rear corner… the black caps are FW & Rowney artist’s acrylic inks, the white caps are my ever-growing Reaper Master Series paint collection, and there’s a random assortment of GW, old Ral Partha and other paints in the gap between the inks and the Reaper paints. The good paintbrushes live in the old superglue bottle at centre, with the new superglue lurking behind. The round white cookie tin is the tin of tools – Xacto knives, needle files, old beaten up paintbrushes, tweezers, and on and on. Finally in the back right, that small box has spare Xacto blades, putty, glues and other tools.
Front left has my painting swatches (very useful strips of white card with small rectangles of most of the colours I own painted on and labelled), scrap paper to take notes on paint schemes, then the random assortment of miniatures around the cutting mat that give this post it’s title. There’s a Reaper dragon, Russian Civil War Cossacks from both Copplestone and Brigade, some Copplestone cavemen, four Pulp Figures deck guns, and a few random figures just to round out the collection. On the right is my painting palette (a used CD) and a folded paper towel to wipe brushes on.
I’ve decided that one of this summer’s projects is going to have to be a shelf set of some kind to go at the back of my painting desk and give me space to better organize the paints and other stuff. Hopefully a cleaned up and reorganized painting area will get me applying the brush to miniatures again, I’d like to finish the Cossack cavalry in the next couple of weeks for a mid-June RCW game!
As I predicted when I linked to it, the very nice Games Workshop tutorial on painting horses has vanished from their website, which is a shame. Thankfully, there’s other good resources out there for horse colours and markings.
Via Wikipedia, a useful little graphic of the stripes, blazes and other markings horses can have on their heads. A scattering of this sort of thing amongst your cavalry really adds character.
First of all, Wikipedia’s very useful article on Horse Markings has great diagrams of the variety of face, leg and body marks horses can have, and the Equine Coat Colourarticle, while not as nice as the markings one, at least has some good pictures of varieties of horse colour.
I speed-painted these guys in about two evenings back in March so they could add a bit of colour to the Russian Civil War game I ran at Trumpeter Salute, but haven’t gotten photos of them until now.
The figures are Copplestone’s Bolshevik Sailors, although at this point they could fight for either side; the Whites had sailor-infantry too, although nowhere near as well known as that of the Reds. I painted them up in fairly pristine naval uniforms, which is probably slightly more Hollywood than historical, although the various naval units were known to cling to their unique insignia and uniforms in the field — they did have a reputation to maintain, after all! I have to give credit to other people who’ve painted these figures up beautifully, especially over on Lead Adventure, as I cribbed freely from their photographs to get these sailors looking good and fairly accurate.
A section of Russian sailors for my RCW forces. All figures by Copplestone. Click for full-size, as usual.
The colourful naval uniforms help break up the unrelieved khaki mass of my Reds; my Whites get their colour from the plaston of Cossack infantry that forms about half of my current White. The sailors will get another round of highlighting at some point, likely when I paint up the new sailors I recently ordered from Copplestone. The faces and blue uniform items especially could do with another highlight. Still, not bad for pre-convention speed painting, I think!
Two Hundred Posts!
This post also marks the 200th post here on the Warbard! Not bad for less than 18 months of activity in this format, is it? We had a big burst of activity right at the beginning as I turned content from the old site into posts and caught up on a backlog of stuff I’d never documented, but still the average is somewhere around three posts per week.
That’s 200 posts published (plus about a dozen in-progress ones lurking in the background), 250-odd images, 60 or so comments (about two-thirds from actual readers, the rest from myself or Corey replying to those posts) and 5000+ spam comments, only a few of which ever actually got out into the site, the rest died in Akismet or the moderation queue.
Onward and upward; here’s to the next two hundred!
Finally got the Russian Civil War Armstrong-Whitworth Armoured Car from Copplestone completed and photographed. The new monitor and computer I set up ten days ago helps hugely with good photos, not only is processing them faster the new brighter monitor makes contrast and colour balance easier to sort out. (oh, and I remembered how to set custom white balance on my camera again, which always helps picture quality and reduces the amount of work you have to do on the computer afterward…)
Anyway, the Russian armoured car “Freedom!”, suitable for appearing on nearly any side of the Russian Civil War, all finished and ready for the tabletop:
Side and front views of the Copplestone Armstrong-Whitworth a/c; the priest is a Brigade Games 28mm figure.Oblique view of the car. Most of the weathering is pastel chalk dust.
Two related links, as well. Via Lead Adventure, a very, very high quality (and free!) booklet on vehicle weathering. Most of the techniques aren’t new, but it’s great to have them clearly illustrated in a free, high quality PDF.
Via GWP, this page on Austin armoured cars, mostly focused on the ones that wound up in Polish service but of course it talks about the ones built in Russia that were captured by the Poles. Great photos, including some unique ones I haven’t seen anywhere else.
