A little progress update

Keeping up my Planet Armor approach that each small bit of progress is worth documenting and celebrating. Here’s two figures you’ve seen before finished and ready for varnishing (on the left) and the next two just started (on the right).

The left-most figure gave me some trouble. I want to vary the colours of the blanket rolls through the battalion to aid that landwehr campaign feel so I tried out some red-brown shades for this figure. They were an abject failure and I don’t really know why. More reflection called for there I’m afraid. So that led to a repaint using one of my trusty brown combinations (burnt umber basecoat, beige brown first highlight and cork brown second highlight) with a twist. I chose to experiment with an exceptionally dark brown called german camo. black brown (VMC822) as the basecoat and promoted the three other browns up the layers.

Success! You can see this darkest brown in the deepest central fold of the blanket roll. Don’t be deceived though – the other two “folds” you can see are a). burnt umber rather than german camo black brown and b). aren’t even folds really – they’re actually lines painted on the smooth surface of the blanket roll that give the illusion of folds. This is a tactic I’ve adopted on all the figures I’ve painted recently and really seems to give the texture of the figures a lift.

The two w-i-p figures are the ones that will complete the first company of the battalion and therefore the first officer makes an appearance. As you can see, I haven’t done too much yet. The first step was to paint the figures overall in a mixture of VMC black and Daler-Rowney FW black acrylic ink. Then I started on the faces and the fiddly bits on the caps: the landwehr cross and the black and white Prussian cockade. And yes, I do paint a little black dot in the middle for the central part of the cockade.

It’s at this stage that I also tackle everything that’s in the Kurmark provincial facing colour of red: cap bands, collars and cuffs. This is a four layer process (hull red – red – scarlet – orange-red). As you can see, one figure is further on than the other. The second figure wears a small neck scarf, so I’ve got the luxury of choosing a colour for this non-regulation item. I want something that’ll stand out from the red and dark blue of the uniform without being garish or unprototypical. I expect I’ll go for yellow or light blue.