Can I Still Paint 28mm Miniatures..?
...Or Will My Wobbly Hand Issues Sink Me?
Moving on from the kit bash phase of this latest mini series project, it's time to get to the scary bit. Painting.
The good news is that in the couple of years - now - since my mini strokes I have doggedly persisted at trying to get back into model making even if the quality of the end products has been at a reduced level. Basically, my hobby has always about *doing* something creative and having fun rather than achieving any kind of perceived 'perfection'. (I've never been interested in entering painting competitions.)
 |
| Above: A lovely Trench Crusade New Antioch Warband done by Simon Slater. This was what inspired my attempts |
This persistence has resulted in a very slow but perceivable improvement in my dexterity and the wobbliness of my right hand. When I look back at early videos of my modelling projects my wobbly hand was painfully obvious and frequent, while - of late - I better know how to control my 'crazy hand', am more willing to take as long as I need, and I tend to avoid doing precision work when I am particularly tired or stressed (time when my shaky hand always comes to the fore).
And so, it seemed like it was time I 'upped my game' and try something a bit more advanced. So here we go...
Trench Crusade New Antioch Lieutenant Figure
I wanted to base my 'New Antioch' faction warband on World War 1 French, focusing on the historical use of the 'Horizon Blue' French uniforms of the mid to late Great War. The trick, of course is to integrate this historical scheme into the Grim Dark look of the Trench Crusade aesthetic.
 |
| Above: Historic WW1 French Army uniform evolution. My interest for this project are the 'Horizon Blue' versions (1916-18). |
I'm not really altogether familiar to the whole Grim Dark look yet, from what I've seen all colours are *very* muted, but I like the French Blue so much I took the decision to go a bit more historic than stylised... Hope that doesn't turn out to be a bad choice (foreboding)!
Anyway, I started pretty conventionally - as if I were just painting historic French - as I was relying more on the anachronistic kit bashed additions to the soldiers kit - the medieval bits - to give the provide the Trench Crusade look.
 |
| Above: My 'French Lieutenant', early paint coats and washes. |
Something a bit new to me were my experiments with Vallejo Game Color Washes and the new fangles 'Express Color' contrast paints. It was always my intention that this small series of kit bashed TC figures should be a experiment in painting technics prior to my undertaking my other 'KRIEG' figure project.
So I did expect some unexpected results and was prepared to do some repainting to correct mistakes (and as it happens I was right to expect the bloopers as they did occur)! 😏
 |
| Above: Early colour blocking before any weathering or shading work began. My hope was to start 'bright' and then tone down. |
Anyway, at the early point of painting I was merely content with painting that wasn't too shaky and despite a couple of little mishaps I did manage to complete the basic coats of colour OK.
In fact, I got overly engrossed in just doing an acceptable paint job and completely forgot what I was ultimately trying to achieve. And so, when I partially completed the first paint job and looked at it it wasn't really Grim Dark enough at all! This view was confirmed when I showed the early results on the Facebook Trench Crusade forum, and the consensus was that the figure was 'too bright' and not muddy enough!
I just hadn't captured the Grim Dark! 😐
So, the project turned into one of backtracking as I retroactively tried to add a Grim Dark colouring over my pristine painting job. The main tool for doing this was to apply an oil paint wash in a muddy brown...
 |
| Above: The bright base colours toned down a lot by applying a heavy wash of thinned brown oil paint. Once dry this dirtied up the colours and muted them quite nicely. |
Obviously, this retroactive darkening of the colours is not nearly as good as designing a muted colour scheme from the get go, but lesson learns (and anyway, I secretly like the still very recognisable French Blue showing through, it might not suit everyone and is only Grim Dark-Lite).
So, I carried on. The next stage was to start applying the details through a series of shading and highlighting stages. Here I progressively deepened the shaded areas with hopefully subtle darker detail and likewise built up raise highlighted areas going the other way.
And the last stage - and the trickiest for me - was the use of a very very fine brush to catch the lightest highlights and colour detailing. This - obviously - took me the longest and I had to break from this quite a lot to have little rests between sessions.
However, in the end I manage to finish off the little figure and was quite pleased with the results...
Conclusions...
As a Grim Dark Trench Crusade project my attempt kinda failed a little bit, especially when compared to some of the other examples on the TC forums...
 |
| Above: Ryan Hamer's New Antioch Warband really captures the Grim Dark mood a lot better than I did! |
Still, once again, my effort was largely a practise piece and experimentation so it was never likely to go all together perfectly well. That said, I got a lot of pleasure out of doing it - perhaps the main point - and learned a lot of new tricks and techniques that I could take forward onto future models.
The main lesson was to have a painting scheme plan before starting that fts into the aesthetic that you are going for. A retroactive attempt to 'fix' a unsatisfactory scheme is never likely to entirely work.
Ironically, having started this flawed scheme of work I am now locked into it for the next few models in this mini series!
.....I still like French Blue though! LOL
Post a Comment