PAINTING

Simple but effective painting

       Once your figures are undercoated, you are ready to begin putting down colour. We all find our own routines for this, but I prefer to start off with the main jacket colour using a thin wash of either liquid (transparent) acrylic or ordinary acrylic thinned down to a washing consistencey and with a touch of varnish added to help stabilize the colour. Don't be too precious about neatness here. Acrylics are very forgiving and overpaint very well.

      After the jacket, I usually block in the trouser colour, musket, pack, blanket roll, boots/gaiters and shako/helmet main colour.

       Allow the figures to dry well between each stage or force dry them in yoor hairdryer box. NB. alkydes and oils force dried tend to take on a high gloss finish that is quite difficuly to paint on top of. Alkyds in particular, treated this way, give a wonderful finish to large scale horses or those of generals.

       The next stage after the shako, is to paint in the face and hands before going over belts, facings etc. with white. At this point add the musket straps and those on the pack. Next add the facing colours any epaulettes and musket barrels, bayonets or swords.

       You can probably see here that rather than working from the inside outwards, I tend to paint from the largest areas of colour to the smallest.

        By this stage, the figure is just about there. You can now add any shako plates, buckles and musket bands but NOT chin straps.

        Make sure the figures are properly dry then either use a sepia coloured wash or a very thinned down brown paint stabilised with varnish and gently go over the face and hands, allowing the paint to slide off the high points and collect in hollows, You can treat other areas such as jackets in the same way, either giving the whole figure a wash of the sepia or using a deeper shade of the coat colour (or wherever).

          Allow to dry again, dry brush the face and hands very lightly with the base flesh colour, add hair colour/moustache if any, then add chinscales. Finally paint in the figures base.

Marshall Michel Ney "Bravest of the Brave."

       You can see on the picture of Michel Ney where the coloured washes have been allowed to pool and been over-painted. After these washes are dry, I emphasised the changes in colour by ink lining round details such as cuffs, lacings and facings. These are what the various drawing pens are for. It's far easier to do this with a pen than a brush as the line is constant in thickness and depth of colour. Detail as far down as individual buttons can be brought out or even drawn in using this method. The pen should be used angled into the detail and should be of a size that doesn't make the shadow too wide.