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.
Quiet by our usual standards here on the Warbard this week of both Pi Day and the Ides of March, but I’ve been busy with a couple of small projects leading up to my Russian Civil War game in a few weeks at Vancouver’s Trumpeter Salute convention.
Russian graveyard pieces and other bits. See text for details, click for larger.
Centre foreground and most obvious, some of the Russian Orthodox crosses Archeotech made for me, going into a small graveyard to go alongside my onion-domed church. The wooden thing behind the crosses is the start of a rough wood-and-sandbag-protected train car, as a low-tech armoured train for my Russian games takes place. Behind them, six 28mm horses from Brigade Games; the RCW Cossack riders are mostly lying down in the top right corner of my cutting mat, except for the one who is currently “riding” the hood of the RAFM staff car I painted ages ago and am currently touching up.
Finally, lower right has a random scatter of Reaper fantasy figures for my next “distraction” painting project, the small side project I always have going in case I need a change of pace!
I also learned this week that the Trumpeter Wargame Club, who run the annual Trumpeter Salute convention, mentioned my RCW game as a “Featured Game” in their most recent email newsletter to members… no pressure, then!
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!
So I promised to run a Russian Civil War game at a friend’s place on the Nov. 11th long weekend; I made the promise ages ago and suddenly looked at a calendar and realized that’s about two weeks away… and it’s been months since I’ve touched a paintbrush or even looked at most of my RCW stuff!
So this weekend it’s cracking on with the half-finished 20 or so mixed infantry, another dozen Red sailors, and the finishing touches on the mostly-painted cavalry force. I’ve also got an assembled field gun I might try and get painted and based, just to add variety and give whoever doesn’t get the armoured car in our game a weapon capable of actually killing the thing!
Right, fresh water in the pot, clear the crap off the painting desk… amazing how an underused space attracts random junk, isn’t it?
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.
Missing Links? Yeti? Sasquatch? Some other sort of yet-undiscovered ape-man? The result of Mad Science? Any or all of the above?
Hairy Apemen from Pulp Figures & Uncle Mike
The two big guys are from Pulp Figures, PLT-7 Hairy Hominids, the two smaller figures are from Uncle Mike’s Strange Aeons line, the Missing Links. They’re all on bases I constructed of pennies and milliput, as usual.
Left to right, we have Momma (holding a skull), Pops, Junior (in the background, mugging for the camera) and finally Uncle Fred. I might yet do one last round of highlighting on their hair, and the bases do need a bit more work, but they’re playable as is. Not sure when they’ll get their first outing to terrify explorers or hapless cavemen, but hopefully soon!
Just a pair of painting tutorials today, linked to mostly so I can find them again when I need to refer to them!
Coll Mini Or Not (CMON) has a huge list of tutorials, contributed by users so they’re of variable quality and usefulness. One of the best is this well-illustrated look at ethnic skintones. Painting skin is something I’ve never found easy to do well, and even those I don’t use the Vallejo paints referred to in this article I still found it valuable. The index to their Articles section is here, a whole mix of stuff well worth checking out.
Games Workshop have a great horse painting tutorial, with a good primer on horse anatomy and colours as well as painting tips. I’m no fan of GW’s business practices, nor of most of their sculpts, but their technique has always been top-notch and they write a good tutorial, so credit where due. They also completely rebuild their own website every year or so, so this link might not be as stable as it ought to be…
