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| These are so tiny - after over a year of not messing with this stuff I thought they were even tinier than ever. Luckily I'm severely near-sighted so no decay in vision so far for this kind of work. |
5/30/21 - Finished up all of the ones I was going to use Contrast paints on today - three packs: Artillery crew, Unarmed pirates and Pirates with Prisoners.
I tried to use exclusively Contrast paints so had to buy a few colors for variety. The only place I cheated was adding metallics on buckles, sword hilts and all the metal bits. I also cheated on the pair of buckets for the artillery crew as they were just too dark to be satisfied with. There's actually much I'm not particularly satisfied with but overall they are on par with earlier examples. I'll have final portraits with side-by-sides in their own entry. Now, in no particular order - the results of this only third and last session - it is indeed faster than layering:
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| A hold over from last week so you can see the skin and cloth effects. |
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| (L) Pirate Artillery Crew, (Center) Unarmed and (R) Hostages |
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| They came out alright - definitely faster, but not sure they are much better. |
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| Unarmed and Hostages (pirates with prisoners) |
****Update material is above this line. ***
5/23/21 - After more than a year, the paintbrushes are finally redeployed. I can't resist collecting all the later Peter Pig (PP) Pirate Range sculpts. The originals are already featured elsewhere on this blog and were painted in my usual layering style. But like everyone else, I'm looking to speed things along while maintaining high levels of quality.
In this case, however my quality only needs to approximate that of the original - tidy, but certainly not showcase quality. Of the new PP sculpts, I looked for some that didn't have too many fiddly details. As you may already know about Contrast Paints, I think they are best covering large portions of the model instead of using them to pick out tiny details like belts and such. On 15mm, I don't want to master that level off precision keeping tiny items free from whatever adjacent Contrast color I'm using which is best applied in blobs then spread around quickly before it dries.
These models had lots of skin and not a lot of gear - so suitable subjects for a go at Contrast paints in this scale. It's a multi-decade formed habit to break from 3-4 later dark to light progressions.
This presentations ain't that great but I wanted to record my progress and my thoughts. I did purchase all three of the "flesh" colors: Fyreslyer, Guilliman and Darkoath. The Fyreslayer is the darkest and best captures the Carribean suntanned look of the three. If you're ever been to Key West or it's environs, the "sun people" have a very leathery dark color ed skin - which is what I had tried to capture in my original offerings of this line of minis.
There were a pair of Africans carrying the sponge buckets so used the Cygor Brown for their skin. In retrospect, a mistake - yes it's approximates the right color but doens't work like the other Contrast paints by staining the surface then collecting in the crevasses. Instead, it and comes out a very solid and even dark brown in this scale. I'm not going to fix it but let it stand.
Otherwise, honestly can't notice super sharp distinctions between the Caucasian fleshes at this scale.
My method of determining the direction to take for painting models with random, or un-uniformed kits is as follow: Whatever is most common, I do half in that color. Ex., mostly undyed linen pants for example. Half get that then the remaining half get the exotic choices, again divided by half again, with the most likely color being prevalent first. I also endeavor with pirates to ensure no two figures are uniformed exactly alike and you'll see this strategy in use here in these shots.
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| After some quick applications of this and that |
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| Skin here is all Fyreslayer |
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| These are the "lightest" flesh: Darkoath. If the pirates are to have
captives they may not have the suntanned look of the pirates themselves
so I selected the mostly likely figures that were not sea-faring people,
the prisoners, the women here and the third model of each the sculpts I
have for fulfilling the variety requirements I laid out above.Can you tell the difference? It's very, very subtle at this scale. |
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| Another shot of the Darkoath. |
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| The majority here are in Fyreslayer. |
I'm going to just update this entry as I go along and will do a a final portrait when I'm all done as are all the other photos on this blog. Thanks for looking - questions and comments are welcome and encouraged.
