Showing posts with label Tutorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tutorial. Show all posts

Monday, April 25, 2011

Basing walkthrough

Following up on the painting Confederates step by step a walkthrough of how I base my minis.

Shortcuts?
No shortcuts for me when it comes to basing. It is such an important factor to the final look of the unit that I even do some extra highlights on top of the usual three I do on figures. The time it takes to do an extra drybrush really is neglectable in the whole process. We are talking only a couple of minutes here. The complete unit was based in around one hour excluding drying time for the pumice.

Mistakes
The good thing about basing is that you can make mistakes. You will always get a second chance in the next step to correct and there is nothing a well placed tuft or grass can't hide. So I grab a large brush and start throwing pumice and paint on.

First up the end result



Because the walkthrough is picture heavy you will have to press the read more to enter...


Friday, April 8, 2011

Painting Confederate regiment, step by step




Finished the next Regiment and for the first time I made notes of the colours I used so I will have them ready when I want to paint another and I will have forgotten again. I also took pictures of every step of the process. I am sharing this but since the page is picture heavy I have hidden it after the page break so you will have to press read more if you are interested.
Note that this is just how I did it and there are probably a thousand ways to do it better or quicker.

The Regiments represents the 15th Georgia and the figures are from Renegade. Added them to the ACW gallery.


Changing styles...
To get units on the table more quickly I have adjusted my painting style. While I used to paint batches of four miniatures or so, I now paint larger batches for certain periods. In this case sixteen. This is a significant change since now I paint units instead of miniatures. A new approach with a different way of thinking. As I start I now imagine the end result for the unit as primary objective instead of the miniature that now becomes just a piece of the final product. I have painted too many tiny details in units I guess that are never noticed anyway.
In this case I aimed for the grey irregular look of the Confederates but I also wanted to make it a bit more interesting. With the red flag and the red parts of the officer and drummer I decided to do a madder red blanket roll near the centre and add red flowers to give a bit of colour to the centre to make the unit stand out a bit more.
As for the painting itself I more or less use the method from the well known Dallimore book starting with shade colours and applying highlights.

Who has the right to eyesight?
In the past all my miniatures proudly owned these rights. But after careful consideration I have withdrawn the rights and limited them to certain miniatures. This saves a lot of time and I don’t think eyes necessarily give a better look or add anything to the finished unit. And the other thing with eyes is that if you do them badly it is immediately noticeable.  It’s one of the features everyone will automatically look at when they pick up a mini. So I only grant eyesight to command or maybe a special front rank figure that draws attention, but that’s it. This
unit only has one pair of eyes and they belong to Col. Dudley M. DuBose. The rest will have to follow him anyway. But if you do them, please make them tiny, no even more tiny, and if you think you are done reconsider and tiny them even more, until you almost can’t see them.. If you are still here you will do a good job as your eye for detail is amazing!

This Regiment took me around twelve to fourteen hours to finish; so slightly less than an hour per figure. The fact that these Renegades minis are so easy to paint also reduced the painting time. Oh, and putting this post together adds another hour.

For the step by step press Read More below.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Snow basing tutorial and Winter War Finnish Platoon


It all started when we bought a snow mat. Think it was three years ago and it was delivered at our hotel while visiting Salute. Excited to do some snow fighting we got ourselves a box with pine trees and some other scenery. At home, in the middle of summer, I gave the trees a snow treatment and we were basically ready to game.  By then we realized we also actually needed some miniatures to play with. Lot of choice but since two of our group were doing russians at that time I made the decision to do Finnish troops. Posted before on a forum, now on the blog as I am slowly moving most of my pictures here.





For the 28mm figures I chose Brigade Games and Battle Honors. They go very well together and provide enough variation. The sled is from Copplestone and the ski guy from Warlord (Bolt Action)
So far it is just a small platoon. Since this is one of those projects that have never seen daylight apart from getting them out of the box to take pictures I doubt if they will ever grow to a full platoon.
Hopefully we'll get them in action in the next few months so I can shoot some battlefield pictures.



Now for the snow. There are plenty tutorials around on the net. Some use baking soda, others just paint. I decided to try this with  Scenic Snow bought from Antenocitis Workshop.
I am not releted to them in any way but do struggle all the time to find them because of the difficult name..


This product is really easy to use. They come with instructions so I won't reproduce these in detail. Basically you just use the bond and sprinkle the snow over this. Do this in several layers and you are done.

For the infantry I wanted a muddy snow effect reflecting the battlefield as I had seen in the movie The Winter War (Talvisota) . How I did this:
-Base the figure as you would normally do and paint it using a brown and a couple of lighter drybrushes
-Paint the area on the base you want covered in snow white. A light white drybrush around the edges is fine.
-Put the bond on the white and brown area you want lighly covered, using an old brush. Next sprinke the snow. Repeat untill you reach desired effect.


For the sled I wanted a deeper snow look. In this case you can just paint the base light grey or light blue if you prefer. Then you start to apply layers of snow until you have enough for the desired effect. Press in some footsteps, maybe sprinkle some icy sparkles (in the box) and you are done.




I found this very easy and it gave me the desired effect. Maybe it is even embarrassing simple and you can have the same effect with Woodland scenics and PVA glue or other materials. Anyway I can highly recommend this product.


Brigade Games Command Pack


 
Brigade Games Pack 1


Brigade-BattleHonors
 
BarttleHonors cut in half




BattleHonors
 
Warlord Games