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? 

As always, thanks for looking - questions, comments and followers are welcome and encouraged! I'm doing more and more on Facebook so follow my page there too! https://www.facebook.com/One-of-My-Men-Became-Restless-100659928063858

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

Thanks for looking - questions, comments and followers are welcome and encouraged! I'm doing more and more on Facebook so follow my page there too! https://www.facebook.com/One-of-My-Men-Became-Restless-100659928063858

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!