A game of musical figures

At some point in the next day or two I’m going to remove the link to The Assault Group and replace it with one to Alban Miniatures. Why? Well, rest assured, it’s not because I’ve had a tiff with the boys at TAG. Nope, rather it’s because TAG has just sold its Richard Ansell-sculpted range of Napoleonic 1809 Austrians and Saxons to Alban, so they won’t any longer have anything of relevance to BfK in their product range.

To be honest, this change ownership doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me. Progress on new releases for the range has been painfully slow and the fact that Ansell also scuplts Napoleonic figures for Alban makes this a natural move. I wish all concerned a fruitful future.

Perry French Imperial Guard horse artillery greens

Perry French line horse artillery greens

Meanwhile, one range that seems to keep growing faster than a weed in a compost heap is the Perry Napoleonic range. The latest additions are set to be French horse artillery of both the line and Imperial Guard varieties. I do have a soft-spot for artillery, especially if the crews offer a good range of poses and all those little extras like caissions are covered. I’ve included a couple of shots of the greens for your enjoyment.

Of course, I’ll be resisting this particular temptation because Calpe Saxon artillery is on my horizon.

Brief bedtime note

My head swap / conversion of a Perry French plastic officer got me motivated to move on with the next stage of my experimental study for the Saxons. I’ve stated painting the little chap as a Saxon musketeer officer after finally making some colour decisions.

Most other armies of the period have plenty of blue, red and green in their uniforms but not many boast the opportunity for yellow (especially in combination with light blue). So I’ve decided to paint this study as an officer of one of the two 1813 Saxon infantry units that had yellow as their regimental colour – i.e. the Prinz Maximillian and von Rechten regiments. This means I’ll be doing a light blue surtout with yellow collar and cuffs plus yellow piping on the turnbacks.

But, as usual, I’ve started with the head. Now that I’ve had a chance to put paint to plastic, I’m convinced that the faces (and heads in general) on the Perry plastics are better than on their metals. This one’s got a nice expressive face with the mouth open as if shouting a command that lent itself to easy paintwork. Plus the bonus of an unsual covered shako that has what looks like a nasty sabre slash in it. The pom-pom is the exact same size as on the the Calpe Saxons and gave me a good chance to practice how I’m going to paint these correctly with the bottom half white and the top half in the regimental colour.

For the yellow I went for a Flat Earth (V983) basecoat followed by Ochre Brown (V856), then Flat Yellow (V953) and lastly Lemon Yellow (V952). A slight change from my previous yellow palette to give me greater contrast from basecoat to final highlight. White is a colour where I’m hoping to find a new, less harsh palette. This time I’m experimenting with a Light Grey (V990) basecoat and working through Sky Grey (V989) and White Grey (V993) to White (V951). It seems to have worked well but that’s possibly a bit presumptive when we’re talking about a total area the size of half a pom-pom! The real test of this palette will come when I get to the trousers.

Anyway, head, cuffs and collars all done – next stop the piping on the turnbacks with some painting technique observations for Von Peter Jnr. And I’ll try to take a half-decent photo or two to illustrate what I’m doing in this study.

Experimental photo shoot

Test shot of Perry plastic officer

A quiet Sunday afternoon provides the perfect opportunity to experiment with taking better photos of miniatures and put into practice some of the things I’ve learnt recently. On the one hand, I chose quite a challenging subject – a completely grey Perry plastic French officer. On the other, this was the first time I’ve been able to deploy the tripod and infra-red remote with the camera. I also assembled a couple of lamps from around the house to provide light sources from different angles.

For the technically-minded among you (and so that I’ve got a record of what I did) here are some of the more gory details…

Firstly, set-up: the camera was mounted on the tripod and I actually used my telephoto zoom lens at its fullest zoom (300mm). I set the camera to use aperture preference and started at f8 – the idea being to get a good depth of field. As it turned out, this figure holds a sword that (with the figure’s arm) sticks out about 30mm in front of the figure’s body, which was a bit of an issue.

I blu-tacked a couple of sheets of white A4 paper to the worksurface as a background (just one sheet seemed to be too transparent under the lights). The lamps were positioned to the front and side of the figure at 45 degree angles to catch it in the crossfire, if you see what I mean. This was intended to reduce shadows on the background.

Then I did something I’ve never tried before – I used the camera’s whitebalance functionality to set a custom whitebalance for this particular set-up. I’m sure the method for doing this varies from camera to camera so I won’t go into the specifics here. Look up “whitebalance” in your camera’s manual and follow the instructions. Essentially, I was able to get my camera to measure the lighting conditions on the white background and adjust its own whitebalance setting accordingly. This should remove those yellowish, redish or bluish tinges you sometimes see on pictures taken under artificial lights.

Once that was sorted, I set the camera to work with the infra-red remote shutter release (these tiny gizmos are really great fun), positioned the miniature in shot and started taking photos at various apertures.

Then I downloaded the photos on to the computer and did a little post-processing. I selected the image with the best depth of field and cropped it tightly. Then I tried various combinations of resizing, automatic equalization and lightening. The original images had still come out a little dark and the background was still a bit grey (but tonally neutral) so these tweaks fixed those problems to a reasonable extent.

The final image isn’t ideal but its certainly a promising start. On the plus side, there’s no nasty flash glare, shadows on the background aren’t an issue and I was able to get the background down to a nice unobstrusive and neutral almost-white with a combination of the custom whitebalance and a little post processing.

Painted Perry horse

There’s still room for improvement, though. The main thing is that I’d like to get brighter lighting on to the figure. That ought to reduce the need for post-processing and enable me to go up to higher apertures which will improve sharpness and depth of field. I think choosing a grey figure to photograph was asking for trouble in the first place but once we get to ones wearing paint, that ought to make life easier. At the end of the session, I took a couple of shots of the Perry cuirassier horse I painted at the end of last year to see how things would differ for a larger and painted figure. As you can see, this is easily a few steps on from the pictures I took back then. Given this, you may well be wondering why I bothered photographing the naked plastic figure at all.

Well, it’s all part of my preparation for painting Saxons. I’m anticipating an exciting package from Calpe Towers any day now and I’ve been giving a lot of consideration to conversions with Perry plastic heads and the unresolved issue of suitable paint choices for Saxon officers’ surtouts. So messing around with this Perry officer gives me a chance to kill both birds with one stone. The figure in the photo has actually been decapitated and had one of the spare Perry heads fitted (a natty number with a damaged shako). I did the conversion with some drilling and pinning and applied green stuff to hold the pin in place and fill in the gaps. And that part of the exercise went very smoothly.

The next stage is some painting. As mentioned above, the light blue for the surtout is one target. Peter F. has suggested Vallejo Sky Blue (VMC961) but I’ve got to work out the palette to go with it. The other target is a new white palette because I’m still not happy with the one I’m using at present and there’s an awful lot of white on those Saxons! So the shot of the naked plastic is a reference point for the rest of the test painting.

Confessions of a figure painter #1

Prepare to be amazed, here is my confession: I’ve never painted a Perry Miniatures figure.

I’ve acquired a few over the last couple of years and I’ve often thought about taking the clean-up tools and brushes to them but I’ve somehow never quite got round to it. Why? Well, I’m not too sure but I suspect its a combination of things. There’s typically quite a lot of clean up of flash and casting runners on Perry figs; the sculpting style makes for a challenging paint job and I’ve got plenty on my plate with Calpe Prussians.

But, after returning from my Summer holidays, I’ve found it difficult to get motivated to start painting again so I reached the conclusion that a change is as good as a rest. But what I needed was a change that wasn’t going to commit me to too much of a distraction from the Kurmark landwehr. So, at Colours, I was tempted by a pack (just the one) of Perry French cuirassiers at rest. I’m not really sure what I’ve got in mind here. Eventually I’m going to need a single squadron of the 13th Cuirassiers for my 1813 OOB but there’s also the lure of just doing a single figure from the pack and maybe (if it turns out well) putting it into one of the SD Forum painting competitions.

Then there’s my pipedream of experimenting with decals – believe me, cuirassiers have some awkward bits of painting that would be well suited to some decals like the grenade insignia on the shabraque (or saddlecloths) and the regimental numbers on the valise ends. And I’ve got some ongoing correspondence with a nice chap in Oregon that might be fruitful on that front.

The other thing I’ve got to consider here is that the 13th Cuirassiers had an unusual distinctive facing colour for collars, cuffs and hounds tooth edging on the sheepskin saddle covers: in French, the colour is known as lie de vin which best translates as wine dregs. It’s a sort of purply-red winestain colour and some sources describe it as carmine. Now that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The Foundry paint range has a triple of shades described as “wine stain red” (17A, 17B and 17C) which sound tempting and Valljo has a “carmine red” (908) in its range. It would be good to know if anybody’s got experience with these.

So I don’t know where this’ll finish up (or even if it will finish at all) but it’ll be a bit of fun. Plus, there’s the bonus of some painting inspiration already knocking about to fuel the creative juices. Sascha Herm’s done a lovely vignette of charging Perry cuirassiers and Carl Robson painted a whole unit of the at rest figures recently.