25mm Old Glory Cossacks Celebrating!

These were a blast to paint even though they have no battlefield utility at all. One could make an easy case that it was a waste of time. I had considered adding a lance slung over all their backs but that would have been too time consuming and I didn't feel like sculpting all the slings that would be necessary.

Imagine them maybe kicking down doors?

Normally I would have put a wash of GW Ogryn Flesh Wash over these shirtless ones but I don't think they spend MUCH time shirtless in the winter so left it off to keep them appearing pale.

I'm sure it's wrong but I had Brave Combo's Hosa Dyna in my head while I painted these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT-NaSJ15uU  Russians, Ukranians and Cossacks are not the same peoples and can be territorial over their identities.

Still bits of gloss showing through here and there. It might be finger oil too as I've had to handle them to do the bases for quite a while to build up the snow bases.

I'm doing an 1812 Russian retreat game and these celebrating cossacks are wearing their finer clothes. When I get to the fighting figures I'll be doing more muted and darker tones - less reds, more browns and grays.

There's only six body sculpts in this pack and here are the three not dancing.

There are three dancing sculpts - one with out a shirt. This is the first 4 of 8 ...

... and 5-8 ...

You can see the mud spatter on the boots a bit better on these.

These had NO equipment except for these knives on one of the dancing sculpts.

This is the second dancing sculpt with the the coat relatively inanimate.

All reds were done with my new recipe: Vallejo Model Color (VMC) Cadmium Burnt Red as an undercoat base (1 simple coat does the trick) Then a VMC Red as a base color added in was Vallejo Game Color (VGC)  Bloody Red into the VMC Red for the final highlight. Wherever you see red sashes and hat bags I didn't bother to mix the colors but used VGC Bloody Red on its own.

Cossack Mandoliers - a lovely instrument. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOP59Oy7k6w

I could have done more with the steins but got lazy towards the end here ...

One of my favorites in this pack ...

Here's all the blue coated ones ...

... the gray coated ones ....

... the red coated ones ...

... and the brown/tan coated ones.

These are the second dancing sculpt with mostly closed coats. I wanted to make sure I had no duplicate paint jobs while at the same time having a fairly limited palette. You can see identical sculpts here but they are differentiated enough through paint alone.

These are the third dancing sculpt with more open coats.

Overview of the basing; I'll have a tutorial up soon ...