28mm Fireforge - Northmen Folk Rabble - Slap Chop!

These are my first from Fireforge - I've monkeyed around with assembling plastics before but haven't painted up much of it.  For this kind of work, I'm more than happy to take shortcuts to my usual layering method. They are revolting peasants after all.

With virtually no equipment or fiddly details these became very good subjects for what is called "slap-chop" or pre-highligting - combining a zenithal highlight over a black undercoat then tinting in the colors over the that. I used a combination of Citadel Contrast Paints, Army Painter Speed Paints, then did the metal on the weaponry, the flames, and the earthy bases separately. See the process below:

It's subtle enough here that I can't recall which shots have the extra highlight of off white.

They are attractive in their own right now as a kind of ghost army. Drybrushing really picks out the details which is, of course, the point of all this,

Some unseamly mould lines got left behind! (See what I did there?)

Time to add in the colors! 

The ladies got some blues, red, and burgandy - the rest in various browns and greens

At this point I wanted to unify them a bit so in the shot below you can see I did a very light off white over everything to bring it all together.

I had fantasies of doing Object Source Lighting on the torch bearers  - face, torch arm, etc, but chickened out.

 The other lesson I learned here is that these paints do NOTHING over black. Black shadows are fine on everything but the faces, and they look like they are moving about in the night - (but without any real light source). 

For here on out, faces need to be especially lightened compared to the rest of the model. I have some Oathmark Orcs in the queue where I think I got it right.

 

Yes, faces too dark (though they do resemble the figures on the box art) but otherwise the contrast in colors came out pretty well.

Acheson Creations palisade walls and gates in the background along with a pair of Pegasus Russian farm houses

I guess I intend to use these for Oathmark, but they can be used any number of places from Lion/Dragon Rampant, Oldhammer, Baron's Wars, Pig Wars to the Wiley Fantasy games. Much utility and among the easiest projects I've done in a while and the technique will be used a lot more in the future. 

 

Are you slap chopping? 

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