Resolutions October: African Conquest Finished!

Oct 10, 2014 09:55

Yours truly faking painting. 

Note the beverage of the gods.

Explorers Assemble All the colonial African figures are done! The final batches included a bunch of Masai warriors, explorers from various sources and a few lovely ladies as well.

Even though I did get a bit of an early start with the Masai, I'm slightly amazed these got finished this fast, especially considering I didn't go the easy way with the last eleven models. They are all in glorious 3-color style.

These were all pretty fun to paint. I love the shields on the Masai, I really like doing dresses and even the couple of guys in formal, well-documented uniforms which I usually hate, went pretty smoothly.

This means that my box of colonial era minitaures doesn't have any Darkest Africa figures anymore. I know I have a few more lying about somewhere, but the deal was about clearing the old box of backlog. Next month I have to think of something new.

Masai Warriors I think my 3-color is slowly improving too. As you may have read elsewhere, I was the guy who got kicked out of art class in primary school for lack of talent. Therefore I tend to have low tolarance for "I could never learn to paint" whining. If I can do it, so can anyone without an actual physical handicap. All it takes is dedication and practice, practice, practice...

There are still problem points. The eyes tend to be wonky when I do the whites and I still can't do metallics in 3-color. Maybe I should paint a bunch of plate armored knights in a kill-or-cure fashion...

The funny thing is that I used to do freehand ink slogans and tattoos on my figures very long ago. Then I hated freehand for a long time, disgusted by my early efforts. Now I'm beginning to like freehand again. Doing the shields on the Masai was really fun and so was patterning on of the dresses on the ladies.

I'm still not very good at it in the technical sense, but I can do abstract geometric shapes, especially if they are supposed to represent handpainted imagery -- African shields are perfect for this. And it doesn't hurt that I love the black-white-red palette.

Explorers Assemble I've always liked painting female figures. Not because of the usual reasons, but mainly due to the freedom they provide. Men's wear, especially uniforms, tends to be so darn boring. Painting those 48 Portuguese line infantry last year, in exact same pose, exact same uniform, exact same colors, markings and details... it was mind-numbingly boring. I really don't get people who want to build parade ground units...

I tested my latest Foundry colors on these ladies. The lady on the left is in what I call an anime color scheme. This is sort of color scheme is very common in animation. It adds contrast to the figure while keeping the overall color impression the same. She is still the Pink Lady.

It's Wine Red and Nipple Pink. Unfortunately the Wine Red base color was really weak, I couldn't paint it over black and it almost didn't even take on light gray. Maybe it's my imagination, but my newer Foundry colors seem more watery than the original set I bought some years ago.

Explorers Assemble And finally... I call her Ororo.

maxxon


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Comments

3-color works Juha (guest) Oct 12, 2014 12:22

Yep, your three color painting looks good., very good progress with it! Those two ladies are very nice. Just found the article on painting history (through a link, thanks) and it was great, it was like reading my own history.

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