Paint-in #4: heads, hair and hats

Finished faces, hair and hats.

So, after a brief diversion, it’s back to the painting table to finish off the faces (having done the eyes in the last painting session) and to deal with hair and hats (of various sorts).

The equipment checklist is the same as for the last session with the addition of a size 0 Da Vinci Maestro Series 10 brush. The chart below lists the paints I used in this session:

Colour	Basecoat	Highlight 1	Highlight 2	Highlight 3
Black	Black VMC950	Dark Grey VMC994	Neutral Grey VMC992	Light Grey VMC990
Red	Hull Red VMC985	Red VMC926	Carmine Red VMC908	Orange Red VMC910
Flesh	Burnt Umber VMC941	Red Leather VMC818	Flat Flesh VMC955	Light Flesh VMC928
Iron Grey	Field Blue VMC964	(Grey Blue VMC943)	Union Blue NAC24	Azure Grey NAC17
Red Hair	Burnt Umber VMC941	Cavalry Brown VMC982	Red Leather VMC818	Orange Brown VMC981
Dark Blue	Andrea Blue Set 2nd Shadow	Prussian Blue VMC965	Andrea Blue Set 3rd Light

In addition to those, I used Burnt Umber VMC941 and Gold VMC996 for yellow metal items; Dark Grey VMC994 and Natural Steel VMC864 for white metal items; and Old Rose VMC944 for lips.

I started with the faces and a first highlight of Red Leather over all but the deepest recesses (like eye sockets, open mouths, under the chins and so on). Remember that we already had a base coat of Burnt Umber on the faces. The next colour is Flat Flesh which again covers most of the Red Leather while trying to leave lines that represent furrows and wrinkles. The final highlight is Light Flesh which should only go on the highest points like the top of the nose, chin, cheekbones and brow. If you overdo this last step you run the risk of making your soldiers look like the undead! The finishing touch for the faces is a narrow line of Old Rose for the lower lip.

Two of the four figures in the set wear covered shakos (and a third carries one). This offers the opportunity for a choice of colours for the shako covers and, if I were doing line infantry or soldiers fighting in the Peninsular, I’d be tempted by canvas/linen shades. However, I’ve stuck to straight dark oilskin covers this time around. Before going for the shako covers themselves, I like to deal with the details on the shakos. Here that means the metal chinscales and the pompoms.

The train soldiers’ lentille pompoms are iron grey, so that’s a simple overall bascoat of Field Blue followed by successive highlights of the other colours listed above. You’ll notice that I’ve put brackets around Grey Blue in the chart. That’s because I didn’t actually use it on these pompoms – partly because I was experimenting and partly because the pompoms are so small that there’s not much benefit to be had from using a fourth colour. The artillery drummer has a nice bright red tufted pompom for which I mostly followed my traditional red palette but using Carmine Red instead of Scarlet for the second highlight. At the moment, I favour this approach because there’s a slightly more obvious difference between the Carmine Red and the Orange Red. For the chinscales, I basecoat in a dark non-metallic shade and then paint the metallic colour over the top. If it needs it, I then use an extremely watered down wash of the non-metallic colour and retouch with the metallic colour for highlights.

Black can be a very difficult colour to highlight effectively. Luckily, these shako covers are a relatively small area, Peter has sculpted plenty of folds into them and they’re the kind of item that I think gets dusty and faded. All that makes highlighting with increasingly lighter shades of grey quite forgiving though the important thing is to avoid making the whole look grey rather than black. To ensure this doesn’t happen, I leave plenty of the black basecoat showing through and, after the final highlight, this is one of the few occasions when I’d recommend some judicious blacklining.

That leaves us with one of my favourite uniform items from the Bardin regulations: the pokelem, which replaced the previously used bonnet de police as the forage cap. Many Marie-Louise’s didn’t receive a proper shako and had to make do with the pokelem instead though I suspect it was a more comfortable item to wear and had the benefit of fold-down flaps to keep the ears warm. The colours I used for the red and blue are listed above. Of note here is that I strongly recommend the 2nd Shadow from the Andrea Blue Set. It gives a dead matt and truly deep dark blue which is an ideal starting point for French blue – more of this in later paint-in sessions. The second point to note is my approach to the piping. I paint the piping first and I don’t worry too much if the lines are too thick or wobbly to begin with as I work up through the successive highlights. Once I’ve done that, I then paint up to the line of piping that I want with the blue basecoat. It’s much easier to get a consistent, neat thin line of piping that way round. Once I’m happy with the piping, I then go on to the highlights for the blue.

While I’m doing the pokalem’s piping, I also tackle the regimental number that typically appeared in red in the middle of the front panel. Let’s face it, it’s too small to attempt to paint actual numbers, so don’t bother! Simply paint a small red patch to give the impression of a number being present.

To finish up, I’ll leave you with a relevant video that Toby Thornton of Artmaster Studio posted recently on YouTube. It’s serendipitously appropriate and well worth watching. The approach to face painting is broadly similar to mine apart from using a slightly different palette of colours and tackling the eyes last rather than first. In the next paint-in session, I’ll turn my attention to trousers and footwear.

 

Paint-in #2: the eyes

Eyes: extreme (non-flattering) close-ups!

If you ask most people which part of painting figures they hate the most, you can be sure of a fair smattering of answers involving eyes. So much so, that there are many who simply don’t bother with them. So that’s the issue I’m going to tackle in this second paint-in.

Before we begin, here’s a cheklist of the paint and equipment I used for this session:

• A Da Vinci Maestro Series 10 000 brush;
• A Da Vinci Maestro Series 10 00000 brush;
• Vallejo Model Colour white paint (VMC951);
• Vallejo Model Colour black paint (VMC950);
• Vallejo Model Colour burnt umber paint (VMC941);
• Tamiya X-21 Flat Base matting agent;
• A ceramic palette;
• A jam jar of clean water mixed with washing-up liquid for brush cleaning;
• A pre-mixed jar of filtered water and Winsor and Newton flow improver for diluting paint;
• A pipette for dispensing the above;
• Kitchen towels for wiping brushes dry after cleaning;
• Pins for unblocking paint bottles;
• Cocktail sticks for mixing and stirring;
• An Anglepoise lamp;

I always begin every painting session by using the pipette to dispense some of my paint diluting mixture into one of the wells of the palette and mixing a little X-21 Flat Base into it – see my video review of X-21.

The first paint we’re going to use is the white, so put a small amount on the palette and dilute it a little with the cocktail of filtered water, flow improver and X-21 to achieve a thin but not runny consistency. Use the 00000 brush to paint the eye sockets white on all four figures. It’s best to use a thin coat of paint; by the time you’ve done the fourth figure, the first one will probably be dry enough for a second coat. At this stage there’s no need to get stressed about accuracy because it doesn’t matter if white paint gets on to other parts of the faces.

Now wash your brush in the jar of water and washing-up liquid and dry it off gently on the kitchen towel. Looking after your brushes as you work is one of the secrets of getting a good long working life out of them and is well worth the effort if you use expensive Kolinsky sable brushes like I do.

The next colour is burnt umber which we’re going to use to basecoat the faces of all the figures and the hair of most of them – I’ve decided one chap will have grey hair, so he won’t get his basecoated with burnt umber. Prepare some paint as before and apply it with the 000 brush, starting with areas of the face well away from the eyes. This way you can get attuned to how both paint and brush are behaving before attempting the more delicate business of painting around the whites of the eyes. As before, don’t worry too much if some burnt umber strays off the faces onto collars or headwear. That’s easily tidied up later.

Now paint as close up to the whites of the eyes as you are comfortable doing with the 000 brush. Some of you might be able to do all of this step with the 000 brush, while others may prefer to switch to the 00000 brush. Either way, you are aiming for narrow almond-shaped whites of the eyes. To avoid that goggle-eyed effect, these almonds need to be thinner than you think. As before, be prepared to apply paint in two or more thin layers rather than one thick one. You’ll get a smoother finish that way as long as you let each layer dry before applying the next. With four figures to work round, drying times shouldn’t be an issue anyway.

Don’t be afraid of mistakes. We all make them and I had to make a number of corrections as I went along to get the results shown here. Just let the burnt umber mistakes dry before going back over them with white and repeating the above steps until you have eye shapes you’re satisfied with. Don’t forget to keep cleaning your brushes as you go along.

Next it’s the pupils of the eyes and we’re going to use black for these. Prepare a small amount of black paint on the palette and load the 00000 brush with only a little paint. Now go for one confident thin vertical stripe down the middle of an eye. Notice how I’m not suggesting that you dot the pupil. To do that successfully requires a much steadier hand and risks spoiling the work you’ve done so far if you misjudge how firmly you press the brush tip on to the eye. The vertical stripe technique is much easier to master and delivers equally good results at this scale. Now all you have to do is repeat it another seven times!

The only drawback of this method is that your black lines will probably extend beyond the eyes and on to the burnt umber basecoat. So one final round of tidying up with burnt umber will be required to finish the job. That’s all for this time. In the next session I’ll move on to finishing off the faces and maybe even starting on the headwear.

Andrea paint sets tutorial series

I picked up something interesting from a post over on Steve Dean’s forum. A man called Dave Youngquist of the Michigan Toy Soldier Company has started a video tutorial series on YouTube about using the Andrea paint sets. Now that’s obviously of interest to me because I’ve been experimenting with the white set for a while. But it’s also got some other added areas of interest like Dave’s use of Da Vinci brushes and various aspects of his techniques. So I’ve embedded Part One of the series below and I’ll embed the following parts as things go along.

The tutorial uses a figure in a much larger scale than the 28mm of interest to most BfKer’s but things like the consistency of the paint, the way Dave holds the figure and all sorts of little tips he throws is as he goes along are worthy of attention.

On a tangent, this whole business of YouTube video tutorials and SBS’s really intruiges me. Nowadays, anybody with a mobile phone can record something and upload it to YouTube for the whole world to see. But it’s a long way from the simple act of doing so to producing something of real quality on an amateur budget with affordable equipment. I reckon that Dave has done a good job here and I’m going to be following the rest of the series.

Lastly, to avoid any confusion, I can’t take any credit for this tutorial and any intellectual property rights belong to Dave and his colleagues.

3/0 brushes side-by-side

Da Vinci and W&N 3/0 brushes.

Before I dip ’em in paint, I thought I’d record the virgin state of my sample 3/0 (AKA 000) Da Vinci brush alongside the same size of Winsor and Newton brush. The Da Vinci brush is the top one in the picture above though you’d be hard pressed to spot the difference between them if they didn’t have the makers’ brands printed on the handles in gold lettering. Visually, they are remarkably similar – both with highly polished black handles, shiny nickel ferrules and almost indistinguishable tips. The Da Vinci is perhaps a fraction heavier with a slightly fatter and longer handle.

Pricewise, I suspect that the Da Vinci brushes are less expensive than the W&N ones but it depends on where and when you buy them. Of course, the final reckoning will come when I actually wield the Da Vinci brushes in anger.