Highland Bling

(Don't hate me for the title, it just happened...)

Hi folks, a fun one today, these three have been a blast:

must stop painting hard to photograph brown tones...

These are a the latest commission and are a mix of the new plastic Scions and Victoria miniatures kilt legs and pith helmeted heads. The combination works really nicely I think, something about the anachronistic helmets and the ornate armour is fairly "40k-bonkers". I had completely free reign on the colours for this one so had to think through the feel and balance of the models. The kilts were going to be tartan, the helmets "pith canvas" so there were already colours there, the armour would have to either complement all the colours in the tartan or be a more neutral tone. In the end, I figured that painting the gothic armour in bare steel would be neat. In fact, the whole thing cried out for Victorians in Spaaaaace vibe. So I went with it.

love the stowage on these guys

The rest of the uniform was a either Val English Uniform and Val Khaki. Because everything else was so uniform on them I felt they deserved some individuality, so each got their own tartan on their kilts. I'd like to give some form of full tutorial on the tartan but it really is a matter of fiddling back and forth until you get the result you want. Tartan is created through intermixing coloured threads during weaving so can look very complex, we just use paint so the thought process is different to the weaving and it's one I am still getting to grips with. I feel I can, however give you the basic theory behind getting tartan looking right:

Start with a solid base colour of the background, shade the background in any creases as you won't want to later. Make a mixture of the background and whatever colours you want the squares to be until it looks like it's a 50:50 mix. It won't be, it'll be more like 3:2 or even 2:1 depending on the strength of pigments. Paint these in a broad grid over the tartan, trying to keep the spaces even, you want the gap between the lines the same width as the lines themselves. Then paint the pure colour you wanted into the squares formed where the lines cross.This gets you the basic shape of the tartan.

Now you need the stripe colours, these can be all sorts of colours but here I'm using black. Very, very thin lines (thinned paint and a decent point on the brush here) and paint through an area of the pattern, chose either in the stripes or crossing them. Both will look messy. Real tartans often have multiple lines but we're dealing with 28mm men here. It'll look fine by this stage but you may want to kick it up one more notch and darken the edges of the stripes where they meet the background. Helps the finished look.

Animated .gif! PVP, now with awesome mid-nineties technology...

Look through the tartan patterns on line to get inspiration. Though bear in mind that some patterns that look cracking on people will look utterly horrible on a miniature. Use good plaid judgement folks.

With that, I am off. Happy painting folks

TTFN

Inq28: A grenade launcher and a kilt...

Greetings one and all and first I simply have to say: 200 Followers! Good Lord. Seriously, three years ago when I started this I didn't think there would be half as many people interested in the random wurblings and paint daubs of a hairy bloke in Cardiff. You are all clearly people of impeccable taste, peerless intellect and I'll warrant devilishly handsome too.

But now, on to the real matter of the day, some painting! This chap was finished last week and is another in the line of Inq28 models I am doing.

This grizzled veteran is a member of Inquisitor Vandemar's warband, I talked about his construction in an older posts. He is a ex-guardsman demolitions expert and bombardier. His story will be up on the beard bunker before long. He's a professional looking soldier and so I wanted to keep his colour scheme subtle and subdued with one important exception:

The kilt! Tartan isn't easy to do but with patience and a determination to put every line properly into place you can get some really nice effects. Anyone from my family reading this miiight recognise the pattern:

Its the Duffy tartan, which I'd be entitled to wear from my maternal grandmother's side of the family. I thought I'd use it for this model as for almost every other tartan kilt on models they will have regimental tartans. This one didn't so I jumped at it!. Looking at the image above I'll talk you through the process I went through. First I applied a solid basecoat of Caliban Green. Look at the image, the white lines are the delineating feature of the pattern. As a result I painted the white lines first. Then darkened and lightened the appropriate squares. Yellow lines were painted next - sadly not the nice double line but I valued my sight - with green lines either side of them to cut them up. Its the constant crossing and cutting of the lines that is the crucial feature of tartan designs. If you have a clean line with no cuts on there then it will start to look odd and unreal.

As far as the rest of the model is concerned, the cloth was all Val Grey Green, the backpack and weapon sling Val English Uniform, shaded with Agrax Earthshade and highlighting with Val US Field Drab. This gave a pleasant canvas look. The grey-green gave his shirt and gaiters a very military look.

The autogun and it's underslung grenade launcher were given a very spare, utilitarian paint job. Simple green composite furniture and dulled metal fittings. Its got a nice military feel to it.

So there we go! Another in the line of Inq28 figures. I was going to publish him later in the week but 200 followers was too tempting to celebrate. Back to Flecktarn Imperial Guard now!

TTFN