Look! Tiny space wizards:

Crispin, Bonk-stick Pete, and Mr Stabs

I seem to be stuck on a slightly-off split complement of green and yellow with red as an accent colour. In fact, one of the things I’ve enjoyed about painting my bretonnian knights is being forced into thinking up new schemes (although the green fella there has gold decorations, red leather, and a yellow horse, I’ve just noticed). Which rather leads me to my accidental deployment of an interesting technique:

The top-knots are GW “Dark Flesh” (red accent on a predominantly green and yeller model you see, it’s all connected) which I accidentally over-watered. On the white undercoat this had the quite pleasant effect of staining the colour strongly in the recesses with a pinkish tone to the highlights. a quick drybrush of Dark Flesh with a bit of white finished off the effect nicely. Minimum effort! Hurrah!

Dark Flesh (VGC “Dark Fleshtone”) is a very nice colour, by the way. It’s a mahogany-ish red-brown useful, to me, primarily as a naturalistic, organicy red. I’m not very sophisticated with colours, you see, so I’m only really capable of thinking of paints as being “bright” or “a bit brown”. Pre-mixed colours in the “a bit brown” range are therefore extremely handy.

I wouldn’t use it for flesh, though, unless I were painting some cartoonish native americans, maybe?

Anyway, here’s the gang all together:

Nigella, Nigel, Mr Stabs, Stern Terence, Bonk-stick Pete, and Crispin

In game terms, this is enough Eldar Warlocks to field a Seer Council, which is a unit best described as a “terrible idea”. I’ll lose some games in a very fun way, I should think.

The products of last week’s endeavours:

Sir Unit Champion

I’m quite proud of the white face on the horse. Also, the film around the transfers has dissolved far better than on the others. From this I have learned that microsol is best left overnight to do its work.

Sir Standard Bearer

Sir Standard Bearer has a dragon on his head holding a sword! Sir Standard Bearer has some gold and yellow on him, which is complementary to the purple and therefore draws the eye. I neglected to include anything for it to draw the eye to, which is a shame. So the model lacks a focal point despite my borderline cleverness.

Sir Musician

Despite some early troubles caused by a dodgy bottle of dark green paint, Sir Musician came out reasonably well. But please take my strong advice and never, ever, think “I’ll do some quick checks! That’ll spice him up a little for very little effort!” You are fooling yourself if you do, you foolish fool.

GW Catalogue Pose

And there they are: all my painted Bretonnian knights in their glory. One more knight and a leader and I’ve a legal army to field!

I’ve caught up on Primus and fixed pictures on m’blog – the latter with the help of friend Alex.

I’ve completed five more guys – the front rank! – for my Bretonnian Men-At-Arms:

Toot toot! March march!

The only slightly notable thing about them are the dolphins I’ve freehanded on the shields. They were very quick but I think they’ve come out okay! A bit of work and a fancier version should be fit for unit banners and my general’s heraldry.

That’s two whole regiments of tiny peasants complete. Next week: some tiny knights!

I also finished off the little War Dog:

Woof!

By my standards the colours are exquisitely blended. By the standards of a pro… not so much.

I very much like him though.

More Bretonnian pictures here.

More Khador ‘uns here.

I abandoned my initial plan to paint a figure for me mam this week because it is going to be so annoying to clean and assemble that trying to do it in one week would have resulted in a really shitty job. Instead, I painted up a pile of ickle peasants.

I’m not very good at speed-painting, but I did my best with this lot. First mistake came at the base-coat stage:

Try to ignore all the bits I missed.

Each model got exactly one coat of each colour, with very little care given to correcting mistakes or getting good coverage. I didn’t pay enough attention to restricting my palette and ended up using fifteen different paints at this stage… fifteen paints is fifteen passes – not exactly quick.

The banner is intentionally blank, by the way. I’m not sure about the heraldry for my army yet.

Next, I applied the magic of Devlan Mud wash:

All the arrows you can stick in the ground are a great part of an otherwise ropey kit.

They all got a kludgey, overgenerous application of DM. It would look better with two thin coats, but that would have just taken too long!

Finishing up involved the techniques that I hope will make my Bretonnians look at least a little characterful:

Much better? I hope so.

I drybrushed each guy from foot to waist with a light earth colour, then half that with a darker brow, then half that with a dark brown. The bases use the same browns, but working up from the darkest. Splodges of water-effects on the bases and feet give the impression it’s nice and muddy.

What I’m hoping will be a good effect in the end will be that the army will be mostly grubby peasants with small units of knights. The horses will all be grubby to the same height, which doesn’t quite reach the feet of the mounted poshos. Artistical, eh?

Whoo! Check this bad boy out:

Swoosh! Dakka! Etc!

Finished!

Next week’s project is a Gandalf in a little cart for my Mum’s birthday. Finishing early on Mr Tank should mean I can take a nice, relaxed, run at it.

I’m not sure if I should give more information about finished models I post on here. I’ve assumed that if you don’t already know about ‘em, you probably don’t want to. Thoughts, chums?

Tanky tanky!

A little background: as I mentioned a couple of posts down, I am a giant nerd. The nerdiest of my hobbies is probably playing table-top wargames with miniature figures I’ve painted myself.

The problem with this hobby is that painting the tiny men, as fun as it is, takes blimmin’ ages. So long, in fact that one can rather get ahead of oneself in buying tiny men to paint, which is what I’ve done. I’ll pop a picture of the backlog in an upcoming post but please trust me when I say it’s substantial.

Compared to Project Primus this might seem a little trivial but, frankly, I much prefer them painted, they look ugly all lined up in my living room unpainted and I’ve been slacking off on painting some of the less interesting models (read – almost the entire giant box of Games Workshop “Bretonnians”).

Here follow the rules of Project Secundus:

• Until Project Secundus is concluded I am not allowed to buy any miniature figures (except as gifts)
• Project Secundus will conclude only when all figures designated part of Project Secundus are painted (picture to follow)
• At least one painting project will be completed per week, where a project can be anything from a single figure painted to the best of my capabilities to a group of ten or more painted en masse
• At least every second project must be a Bretonnian, so I don’t end up having to paint them all without a break
• Completing a second project in one week *does* count against the following week

The first model I’ll be completing is the partially painted tank thingy linked at the top of the post. Expect photos on Saturday!

There – that can’t possibly go wrong or become frustrating or anything like that.