From the Wastes of Colony 87

Hiya folks, today we are returning to the inhabitants of Colony87 and adding a couple of new faces to the lineup.

As is usual for my painting I had come up with vague identities and narratives for these chaps. So on the left we have an old successful tech prospector and dealer and on the right we have a down on his luck chap scavenging the worst areas around the Colony. These are my two favourite sculpts of the Colony87 range and were a blast to paint. Let's start with the prospector:

I wanted to keep quite a drab palette for both of these. They felt like "salt-of-the-earth" chaps and thus less likely to be toting bright colours and finery. Vallejo paints covered most of my bases, in this case the dominant colour being the coat and that being German Fieldgrey. Interestingly, both this model and the scavenger have the same colour on them but you wouldn't guess it. This has been shaded with a wash of Athonian Camoshade while the scavenger got the brown Earthshade wash. Otherwise this fella is a mix of leathers and XV-88 on the body warmer/armour. All the colours in the scheme were highlighted with Deck Tan which made for a pleasing almost mono-chromatic feeling palette. The skin got my usual trick of adding a little light grey in place of the normal bone as the final highlight tones to make the prospector feel older.

Like the prospector, the scavenger needed a muted scheme but with one battered splash of colour, the re-purposed space helmet keeping him alive in the nastier bits of the world. His robes are again German Fieldgrey (the top bit) and US Olive Drab which I think might just be my new Charadon Granite, it is awfully close. Might try the "Andy-green" with it and see...

The helmet I was quite chuffed with, starting with my Averlander yellow and then adding little chips and dings with Ammo Chipping paint. Then I started in with streaks of lots of different enamel weathering paints, streaking and stumping them with odourless turps to make a nice rich collection of stains, muck and rust which of course the camera captures about 30% of. Sheesh. Anyway, I decided that a rusty poking stick/metal detecting wand would finish him off nicely. 

I've enjoyed these. The colony87 project is proving a fun little diversion amongst the larger projects (the Tau Battlesuits I'm working on for instance) and the client giving me complete carte blanche for colour scheme has rather set my imagination loose to just have fun with it. Nice.

That's all for today folks

TTFN.