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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25/28mm Crusader Miniatures - Peasants

Perhaps you saw these "in progress"  - they were demo models for skin and hair via various Contrast paints (link below). I ended up finishing them with Contrast too but didn't do much touching up after.

 

I had a drop of left over off-white on the palette and decided to so something I never do as a layer painter - do an all-over dry-brush with it. I see some good dynamics here and there but I would do this again, but differently in the future.

 

Details on hair and skin post here: http://flashman14.blogspot.com/2021/06/contrast-flesh-variants.html

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Citadel Contrast Paints: Flesh and Hair Variants

 

My obsession with Citadel Contrast Paints continues! This time for some peasants for no particular game - though most likely fodder for any number of Fantasy villains.

I thought I'd create a useful reference on the differences between the three "human" flesh colors they offer, but honestly, they are so subtle side-by-side it's hard to really rank them. I think you could use any of them and be satisfied.

This was the darkest out of the bottle and I thought it would be my favorite so I did two out of the four bases with it. As always, it requires the simplest of attention and it's all done. Everything pictures here is just one coat, pretty fast.

Guilliman is the lightest with Darkoath in the middle. Very difficult to tell and the shadow created by the longer hair makes it seem darker than they appear.

Darkoath Flesh

This is the lightest out of the bottle.

As I said, I think you could use any of them and be quite satisfied with them. I'll finish these up quick and see how they look all completed. 

 BONUS: I did the hair to see of that would help you see how the faces turned out: 

The best colors in my judgement are as follows: for gingers, Gore Grunta Fur; for blondes, Skeleton Horde is the most natural; for brunettes, Wyldewood looked best to me.

I'll probably never use the Gore Grunta for hair unless it's a civilian model where a redhead would add variety. Hard to tell here but Snakebite is not a natural hair color so won't use that again here either. Cygor Brown is, as always, too dang dark.

I also won't use Aggaros Dunes for hair either - it makes hair just a tad too yellow to be natural when Skeleton Horde gets it just right.

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15mm Hovels' Procession of Monks

Remember these? I painted these over 10 years ago for my Vikings games. See here for that blog entry.

Last year though I received a half dozen more as a bonus for ordering a bunch of 15mm English/Rural buildings and accessories from Hovels. Pretty sure they always throw in some extras with each order. I think I also got a well in here too?

They are easy enough to paint, uncomplicated figures, lightly equipped, so I tackled them from start to finish this morning thinking they were identical to the ones I already had above. Not so - turns out these are noticeably bigger. Enough to make the others appear as child acolytes. 

Originals at left - newer ones at right.
Presumably, the newer ones are available here:

Again - originals at left - newer ones at right. The modern me wanted to highlight them one more time, but decided I'd rather they fit in with the originals so left it as pictured here.

The size difference is much more apparent in the side-by-side.

The newer ones, though bigger, are slightly worse than the originals - faces in particular are almost a blank canvas. Free is free however.

Can't get a non-blurry shot of these, but you get the idea.

 Thanks for looking! Now back to Napoleonics ...

15mm Dark Ages - Vikings vs. Peasants & More

I'm primarily a Horse & Musket guy but I've dabbled in Dark Ages a bit. Here's Essex's Medieval Serfs with Baggage. Essex sculpts the eyes so I paint them. These could also be useful as Halfling hirelings?

Google tells me these Monks are from Hovels!

I have exactly 60 Old Glory Vikings painted up - at center front here are the Huscarls. I didn't have a rule set in mind - I think Pig Wars was a possibility but these may all be repurposed for Saga. I'll have many more than I need it seems.

Old Glory Beserkers - the Ulfhednar are in another unit unpainted at present. This particular flesh experiment turned out too ashen for my current tastes. They would also benefit from another layer of highlights.

In back there are the Old Glory Viking Spearmen. I painted eyes here too being in no particular hurry.

These 60 peasants are a mix of Old Glory, a couple Museum Miniatures, and the rest are some I don't recall. They were in a set called Peasant's Revolt and came in a quantity of 100? I got them in the late 80's from Modeler's Mart in Florida via mail order. [10/21/2016 Edit - I've since learned the peasant mix are from Table Top Miniatures - now carried by http://www.15mm.co.uk/.]

The rear-left unit was the first one I did and was in no particular paint scheme - just "peasant" colors.

To avoid future confusion, I tried to theme them by color with that rear-right unit being in browns, grays, and tans, the archers in various greens. I see I did the eyes on most of these too - masochism.

All of these were finished by 2007? 08? And they are less than a 6th of all the pieces for this game - one I won't get to for some time I reckon.

Thanks for looking!