Painting Table Sept 18, 2009

I knocked out these last two banner bearers over the last day or so (they are the black primed figures in the 9/17 Painting Table entry). I can paint pretty well when I put my mind to it, but for the most part what I am looking to do is create figures that are of good clean gaming quality. I am not interested, generally, in spending a ton of time on shading and highlighting, but will be careful enough to make sure that the figures look good on the table, and when picked up and looked at more carefully, they look cleanly done. I'm not trying to win any awards. I don't plan on repeating this exercise too often, but wanted to take the time to show a stage by stage view of painting what I would consider a good quality figure. Nothing spectacular...
(Click on each picture for a closer view)

Stage 1 - Base colors

At this point, I am trying to block out the main colors and cover up most of the black prime. In this first stage, a lot of the base work is done with varying degrees of medium to heavy dry-brushing. For the most part, I use Citadel paints from Games Workshop, with a few Howard Hues colors mixed in, especially from their nice range of horse colors. The armor has a medium dry brush of Chainmail, the horses a medium drybrush (two coats) of Equine Brown on one and Bay on the other. The bases have been roughed in with Goblin Green, and the basic clothing colors have been roughed in with a red foundation paint and a light blue.


Stage 2 - Completing the first coat

In this stage, most of the smaller areas that are still in black prime get their first coat of paint. Saddles are painted a leather color, and the rest of the straps, belts, weapon scabbards and weapon grips are painted in varying shades of brown. The exposed face of the one figure gets a layer of Dark Flesh. The red figure gets a layer of brighter red over the darker red foundation except in the recessed areas, which are left darker. The light blue figure's clothing gets a dark blue wash, which settles in the recessed areas, especially the puffy sleeves. The blue wash darkens everything, but this will be fixed later. The Bay horse got a dark brown wash to help define and shade the edges of the harness and other tack. Dark colored horses don't need it, but I find that a light colored horse that doesn't get this treatment is much harder to get look right when painting the harnesses and tack later on.

Stage 3 - Details and clean up

At this stage, the riders are basically finished exept for the absolute final details, which will be adressed in the last stage (stage 5). The face and mustache are painted, leaving some dark flesh in the recesses. I don't enjoy painting faces, and because I don't enjoy it I'm not very good at it. I find that for most figures, a "T" of lighter flesh across the brow and down the nose, with cheek and chin highlighting, when applied over a dark base, looks fine for my purposes. The various browns from the prior stage get some minor highlighting in lighter shades (edges of the saddles etc). Metal details such as buckles, sword hilts and pommels, scabbard decoration and stirrups are painted in bright silver or gold. I generally take some liberties with the use of gold on knight figures such as these. Use of gold on stirrups and the like would have been extremely rare if not unheard of, but it does look nice. Also, the blue figure's clothing is cleaned up by going back over all the raised areas with the original light blue color, leaving the dark blue wash in the recesses. This leaves the shading, but brightens up everything else.

Stage 4 - Horses

I usually base coat the horses early, then do the riders, then finish the horses, as I have done here. At this point, the dark brown horse got a light drybrush of medium brown for highlight, and the Bay horse (which had gotten the brown wash) was drybrushed in Light Bay. The tails and manes were painted black, and the harnesses were painted. Simple colors were painted onto some of the horse tack, specifically the reigns. One thing that can have a dramatic effect on the appearance of a horse, but that I did not take the time to do here, is to spend more time on the horses by painting white "socks", blazes on the nose, etc. There are countless web resources for what horse markings look like, and I would enthusiastically encourage you to seek them out. Most people (me included) tend to treat the painting of horses as an afterthought (as I have done here...).

Stage 5 - Final Details

The horses were finished by giving them both a very light drybrush of light tan, which is more to highlight the edges of the harness and tack, more so than to highlight the horse itself. The manes and tails got this same drybrush to pick out the hair texture. Final bits of decoration were painted onto the horse trappings, and some very basic heraldry was painted onto the shields and onto the red figure's tunic. [Note: I still do have some clean up to do on these figures, as a closer inspection will show. The horses hooves haven't been finished, the red shield needs to be cleaned up, and a few other minor things, but I couldn't wait to write this post. Impatient as always... Maybe I'll post one more picture over the weekend when I am truly done.] I would also note that flocking and finishing a real base on the figure make a huge difference.

For these figures, there is not stage 6, but if these figures were intended to be important leader figures, or more likely if the mood just happened to strike me, I would spend more time on them at this point just adding highlighting and shading, but for purposes of this example, this is what my basic figures get painted like. I would be much more likely to take extra time on a mounted knight at this point if it were riding a caparisoned (cloth covered) horse. Several examples of these are shown a few entries back.