Painting Late War German Panzer IV's

The following won't win any awards (unless you are a much much better painter than me), but is a simple straightforward way to get nice results on a non-airbrushed late war German 3 color camouflage scheme.

The basis of any (or most) German armor camo schemes is "dunkelgelb", or "dark yellow". This color has always apparently been a problem for military modelers, as the interpretation of what dunkelgelb means has been tremendously varied, with tones ranging from darker to lighter, more yellow to less so, brownish or not, a tint of green, or orangish, or apparently just about anything else even remotely in this color family. The issue for someone like me, who wants to base coat my models with a spray can, and doesn't have an airbrush (not a functioning one anyway), is that I need to buy something off the shelf that works. You'd think that within this hobby that such a thing would be easy. Well, it's not as easy as you'd think.

For this batch of models, which were primed a couple of days ago and painted today, I used the Plastic Soldier Company's dunkelgelb spray. When purchasing this at the local game store, I was concerned that it seemed way too green, but I have seen a lot of German armor done by Flames of War players at that store that had similar green-tinted base that looked nice, so I figured I'd give it a try.

Stage 1 - Base coating and foundation work:

1. Prime the models with Plastic Soldier Company dunkelgelb spray. At this point, the models were way too apple/olive green for my taste, so I planned to address this in two ways - dry brushing before any further painting, and an extra dry brush of a light tan color at the very end to knock the colors down more.
2. Using a large #16 artists shader brush, I dry brushed the models with Americana brand craft paint "celery green", a muted light green, and then a little very light dry brushing with Folk Art brand "camel", a light tan color. Picture #1 shows some models after this step. [although this particular picture may be after the celery but before the camel...]
3. Citadel "mechanicus standard grey", a dark grey, was then painted on the tracks, the spare road wheel tires (but not all the road wheels), and the commander figures.
4. A heavy black wash was then given to the tracks, the rear deck engine vents, the road wheels, drive sprockets and all other suspension components, the commander figure, and the gun muzzle. Picture #2 shows the vehicles at the end of this stage.

#1 - Primed and "foundation dry brushed"

#2 - Foundation work done

Stage 2 - Basic camouflage:

1. For these models, I opted for a very basic squiggle pattern of short thin lines. The red-brown is Citadel's "doombull brown" and the dark green is Citadel's "castellan green". Both of these colors work very well. Picture #3 shows the models after this step. At this point the models look way too bright and clean, and the colors too stark. This is taken care of in the next step.
2. Dry brush lightly but thoroughly with Folk Art "camel". This serves to knock the colors down and dull everything up quite nicely. It also takes the green down some and adds some tan back into the mix.

#3 - After camo but before dry brushing

Stage 3 - Detail work:

1. Flesh - base color of flesh is painted and then washed with a flesh wash. At this scale, that's all the detail these little guys get. I used an unbranded basic flesh color and whatever Citadel is calling their flesh wash these days. [I still need to go back and pick out a little detail on the commanders after I do a little research to remind myself of what that little bit of detail should be]
2. Tools and other bits on the tanks are painted brown for wood handles, gun metal metallic for shovel blades, etc.
3. Tracks, which are a very dark grey at this point (having been heavily washed with black in stage 1), are highlighted by dry brushing the road contact surfaces with a gun metal silver color.
4. The edges of the tracks (the parts susceptible to rust) are dry brushed with a rusty reddish brown. I used an older Citadel color called "terracottta".
5. A judicious amount of mud splatter is painted around the road wheels and other suspension parts. If nothing else, this serves to disguise the fact that I only black washed the wheels, and didn't take the time to actually paint all the tiny little rubber road wheel edges black...

The acceptable finished product

I'm not sure I'm 100% thrilled with the end result, but this is the process I used to do three perfectly acceptable Mark IV's in a fairly short period of time today.

The one thing I think I will try next time, way back in step 2 of stage 1 (the foundation dry brushing), is to use a color that is even less green and more yellowy-tan. I am OK with today's result, but not so thrilled that I don't want to continue to tinker with my dunkelgelb just a little. That being said, I have seen a LOT of WW2 German armor painted in this light greenish base, and it does look good.

Product note - These three Panzer IV H's are all-metal Command Decision models from Old Glory (as is the incomplete King Tiger that snuck into one of the pictures). They are decent casts, considering their age, but are nothing like the box of five Flames of War all-plastic Panzer IV H's that I assembled this afternoon. But more on that soon.

Modular Terrain Boards

As part of an effort to get rid of a bunch of things taking up space in the basement, I have been wanting to create a set of modular terrain boards. This would give me a lot of flexibility in setting up the table for games, as well as minimizing the storage space requirements to do so. After a few false starts over the last year or so, I have settled on a plan, and have made good progress towards accomplishing at least a solid phase 1. The end result, when complete, will be a series of one and two inch thick pieces that can be put together like a jigsaw puzzle in a variety of ways to create all sorts of different battlefields. A side benefit (but an important one) is that I have been able to dispose of several larger pieces, ranging in size from 2 by 4 feet to 4 by 6 feet.

#1 - Cutting jig (and hillside template)

For the basics I am starting with a relatively new Owens Corning product (at least to me) called "Foamboard for Projects" which is sold at the local big box home store in 2 foot square panels (1 inch thick). I was thrilled to see these in the store, since getting a four by eight foot sheet home is more of a pain, and harder to cut into smaller squares accurately. Since my gaming table is 6 by 8 feet, I decided not to use the 2 foot squares as is, since the tabletop is recessed about 3/4 of an inch down from a surrounding lip and a test fit didn't really work. I opted to make a jig out of strips of 1 by 2, which creates a 1.5 inch reveal. I use this jig to mark two cut lines on the panels and end up with a 22.5" square, since a 2" wide board is actually 1.5" wide. [See picture 1 for basic panel and my cutting jig]

To make the boards modular, anywhere hills go from board to board either on the center of an edge or on a corner need to be standard. To achieve this I have a few cardboard templates that I use to scribe the edge profiles on the sides of other pieces when building up hills. I have a "center side" template, a corner template, and a river cutout template (also to be centered on a panel). [Templates are shown in picture 2, and the use of one shown in picture 1]

#2 - Cutting templates and planning tiles

Panels can be anything you desire, simple or fancy, as long as they have standard joins on the sides to make them compatible with other boards. Strictly speaking, this isn't even true, as some of the boards in the collection can be non-modular but therefore only usable in certain ways. Standard size building blocks can also be combined into larger pieces (for example, 22.5" by 45", or 22.5" by 67.5"), although as you make larger pieces you create the storage issue I was trying to minimize. In addition to the standard pieces I have made thus far I am working on a "2 block" high hill and a "3 block" river section, using layers of poured Envirotex as the water. Picture #3 shows a basic panel as bought and a finished panel with a simple hill using a center edge join.

#3 - 2' by 2' pink board and finished product

To date I have completed ten pieces, which can be seen in picture #4 stacked in the rack I built (with their end profiles showing to see how they join). Picture 2 also shows some little template pictures I made so that I can play around with table configurations in small scale rather than pulling out all the life sized pieces and moving them around. Each piece is numbered to its matching card. Once I decide on what I want my table to look like for a game, all I have to do is see which tiles I used and pull only what I need out of the rack.

#4 - Edge profiles, and numbered

I will take a picture soon using some of the tiles I have made.

Rohan Foot Warriors

Over the last few weeks, to take a break from the various terrain and re-basing projects I have been working on, I managed to finish up a small contingent of 12 foot warriors of Rohan. These are from Games Workshop's The Lord of the Rings range, and are decent quality plastic figures. Most plastic figure kits you see these days are multi part kits with swappable arms, heads, weapons, etc... These are not like that. Either because they are some of the earlier plastics from GW, or maybe "just because", these are single piece figures with add on shields. As a result, you get a lot of repetition when building a decent sized force. That's the downside. The upside is that these figures can be cleaned, primed and ready to paint very quickly as opposed to many of the other kits these days where the assembly alone is a major project.

These were painted similarly to the Riders posted back on March 26, 2011, seen here. The only real difference with these is that I cut a few corners to speed the process up, and instead of using an Army Painter dip, I used a water-based brown wash (GW's discontinued "Devlan Mud"). I skimped a little on the highlighting also. I am happy enough with them, and they fit the bill nicely for what I was trying to accomplish - finished!

Next up in the fantasy world, next time I venture in that direction, will be completing a block of Uruk Hai infantry for my Isengard force.

Terrain Making - Hedges

A batch in progress

One of my goals for the March/April time frame was to complete a hedge/hedgerow making project that I had begun a few months ago. The goal was to create sections of hedge that would be usable as either hedgerows for 15mm WW2 or as simple hedges for any of my multitude of 25/28mm periods. I worked out a simple process that produced a really nice end result and completed a small batch of about 6 linear feet of hedge. I started a second much larger batch (about 16 feet), but as I often do, I bogged down and didn't get very far into it before moving on to something else that had caught my attention. As a part of forcing myself to sit down and drive this to completion, I took a few pictures and have sketched out the process I used.

Materials List:
Most of the following materials are things that a miniatures hobbyist will have lying around already. The only thing I needed to purchase for this project was the balsa wood in this specific thickness. Everything else I already had.

• 1/4" thick balsa wood strips or sheets
• Sharp hobby knife
• Medium-fine sandpaper
• Large clump foliage
• Sand
• Flocking material (optional)
• Spray paints - medium brown and an optional primer
• Tan craft paint and brush for dry brushing
• White glue (such as Elmer's) and thicker craft glue (such as Aleen's)

After steps 3, 4 and 5

Step by Step:

1. Sections are made using 1/4" thick balsa strips that are 1" wide and varying lengths between 4" and 12" long. I started with 1/4" sheets that were 4" by 36" and cut them down. A single 4 by 36 sheet becomes 12 linear feet of hedge (but does use a lot of clump foliage).
2. Use a sharp large bladed hobby knife to bevel the edges and round off the ends of the sections. I want the exposed parts of the bases of the hedges to give an acceptable illusion of the mounded earth of hedgerows for a 15mm WW2 Normandy look. The 1/4" thickness isn't much, but it's enough.
3. Use a medium-fine grit sandpaper to smooth off the carving work (I think I used a 180 or 200 grit).
4. [Optional] I sprayed the sections at this point with a gray primer to make sure that the liquid in the glue used in the next step wouldn't warp the pieces. I don't think this is really necessary (since these aren't thin pieces), but it was not a big deal to add this step. Allow to dry.
5. Use a disposable craft brush to smear simple white glue (like Elmer's; Aleen's craft glue is too thick to spread easily) over the top surfaces of the  sections. Sprinkle sand over the glued surfaces. Allow to dry.
6. Spray the sections with a flat or satin finish brown color that you find suitable. I used a cheap home improvement store milk chocolate color that cost less than $4. Allow to dry.
7. Dry brush the sections with a tan color craft paint. I used Plaid/FolkArt brand "Camel".
8. Glue chunks of clump foliage down the center of the sections. I used generous amounts of Aleen's Craft Glue to hold down a random mix of Woodland Scenics foliage clusters in dark, medium and light green. I tried to have the clusters fill the width of the stick fairly well, and tried to vary the height a little bit where possible. It also helps if you take the time to make the clumps roundish or ovalish, as very often tearing chunks off the larger pieces leaves lines and corners and unnatural looking pieces. The first large batch of these I have made do not include any trees, as the scale of trees that would look good for 15mm would probably not look right for 25mm. In the latter part of this batch I added a few small trees onto some sections and they look pretty good. I will have to do a batch that has trees at some point.
9. [Optional] You could very easily be done at this point, or you could add one last step which would be to glue random patches of green flocking around the bevelled edges of the sections. They don't necessarily need it, but it can help them blend into the table a little better.

Finished pieces (step 8) with 15mm armor for scale

I wouldn't say the end result is museum quality, but the sections do look very nice on the table. Perhaps the best thing about the project is that it is easy, inexpensive and relatively quick. Large amounts of hedge can be made efficiently and quickly. Given the astounding amounts of hedgerow terrain that a 15mm WW2 game set in Normandy can gobble up, even on a modest sized table, this is a very good thing. [As an aside, the little bit of terrain that I placed on the corner of a green board to take the sample "end result" picture above contains four 12" sections and an 8" section, so one-third of the entire 15-16 foot batch I made fits on that one little piece of terrain board... A 4' by 6' board could easily take 40-50 linear feet of hedgerow]

Wargames Terrain - Archer stake obstacles, part 2

In the first installment of this little how-to I described how I made the rough stands for my Hundred Years War archer stakes. This final post will have a few brief notes on finishing them along with the requisite pictures on the end product.

1. The completed stands are sprayed with Army Painter Army Green spray paint (a medium green olive drab color).
2. The stakes are painted with Citadel's Graveyard Earth (a medium brown).
3. The tips of the stakes are painted with a craft paint, Folks Art's Camel (a tan color). This color looks a little too bright in the picture, but I originally used a duller tan color and while that looked good up close it disappeared into the background when placed on the table. This color makes the points "pop" nicely.
4. Lastly, the bases are coated with watered down white glue and sprinkled with a mix of Woodland Scenics flocking and tiny stones.

An English force drawn up in a solid defensive position

I think the final result is pretty effective at representing what I wanted. The only thing I would do differently looking at the end result is that I would probably be more careful to mix the "factory tip" pieces of stake with the hand carved ones. The factory tips on the toothpicks are perfectly round and tapered and look too well finished on close inspection. The whittled tips look much more like branches or small logs that have been hand-hewn. I tended to cut them in batches and make whole stands of factory tips on the first few stands. Oh well... Live and learn.

English longbowmen behind their stakes

When all was said and done, this project cost less than $10 in materials, and generated 24 stands of stakes in less than 2 hours total time spent. It was also a nice little project in that I completed it in 15 to 20 minute increments over the course of several days. When I had a few minutes to spare, I could pop down to the work area, make a little progress, and stop easily before coming back to it later, after glue or paint had dried.

A well spent two hours if you ask me...

Wargames Terrain - Archer stake obstacles, part 1

One of the terrain projects that I began a long time ago but have needed to complete was the making of a bunch of archer stakes for my Hundred Years War English army. These would be useful little terrain bits that I could envision serving multiple purposes as generic defensive obstacles. In addition to their intended use as archer stakes for the English in HYW, I could see them serving as anything from the obstacles in front of the Ottoman infantry lines at Nicopolis to components of temporary camp protection in ancient battles.

I mocked up one sample stand of these many months ago and was pleased with the result, so I knew exactly what I needed to do, it was just a question of setting aside the time. This is a simple project. To make the 24 stands I am making, the raw material cost is minimal. Most items either came from the household toolbox or miscellaneous hobby stock materials already lying around. I used:

• A power drill with a small drill bit (the diameter of a round toothpick) from the toolbox
• A pair of medium duty snips from the toolbox
• Some craft glue (Aileen's) from the hobby stocks
• An Xacto knife from the hobby stocks
• A 3 inch wide sheet of 3/32 inch thick balsa wood (about $2)
• One pack of 250 round toothpicks (about $3)
• Some paint, flock and other basing materials from the hobby stocks

Each stand is the same size as my standard base for 25mm infantry figures; 60mm wide by 1 inch (or about 25mm) deep, this way each obstacle stand has the same frontage as a single stand of figures. The process is very simple:

1. Measure and mark bases on the large balsa wood sheet.
2. Holding the drill at about a 45 degree angle to the surface of the wood, make 7-9 unevenly spaced holes through the wood (for each base). For this step I placed the wood on top of a styrofoam sheet so I could drill completely through the balsa and into the styrofoam and not hit anything important underneath. (Note that it is much easier drilling all the holes in one large sheet of balsa than it is to drill each individual base after cutting...)
3. Cut the bases from the large balsa wood sheet with an Xacto knife. Be careful. Score, break, sand lightly (if necessary) and trim.
4. After cutting apart the bases, I bevel the upper edges using the Xacto knife held at and angle. I prefer the bevelled edge to a straight edge, but that's just personal preference.
5. For the stakes, I use so-called "fancy" round toothpicks that come 250 to a package. They are pointed on one end (obviously!) and have a decorative banded butt end. Not counting the banded end, which gets cut off and discarded, each toothpick is perfectly sized to make 3 stakes. The first third has the pointed end. After snipping this end off, the cut end of the remaining section needs a little whittling with the Xacto to get it pointed again, then this next third is snipped off. The remaining third is whittled to a point again, and the butt end is snipped off and discarded. (see the top picture for an un-cut toothpick as well as one cut into its four eventual parts).
6. A small dab of glue on the non-pointed end of each little stake gets poked into one of the holes. I find it looks better and more natural to have the stakes pointing in slightly different directions and at different angles.

After about an hour of this, I had completed the 18 stands as shown in the bottom picture. I decided I wanted a total of 24 stands after doing these 18, so I will crank out 6 more before doing the finishing work, which will be part 2 of this little how-to...

Oooh Shiny! - Painting a Rider of Rohan

I have loved the Lord of the Rings since reading it for the first time as a boy. When the movies were released, Games Workshop licensed the figure rights, and have produced an extensive range of miniatures in metal and plastic that faithfully depict everything as shown in the movies. Being a wargamer and such a big fan, I have accumulated a good number of these figures, but have painted very few of them as yet. Of all the different things available, I have largely (but not completely) limited myself to buying Dwarves and Goblins for Moria as well as Rohan and Isengard for Helm's Deep. I have assembled virtually all of the figures, but only painted some Moria stuff.

Ride to ruin and the world's ending!
Over the last few days, my attention has drifted towards Rohan. I caught some of the Return of the King on TV within the last week or so, and saw the scene of the Ride of the Rohirrim at the siege of Minas Tirith. With it seems to have come the apparently uncontrollable urge to paint some Riders of Rohan. So I am taking the opportunity to see if I can come up with a manageable scheme to crank some of these out quickly and efficiently while still putting out a respectable quality figure that will look nice in mass on the battlefield.

I worked through one prototype figure today, and this is what I have come up with. The key for speed on these will be a dark brown primer coat instead of my usual black, and my first full scale use of "the dip". Given the color scheme of Rohan troops in the movies, the brown primer coat will allow me to save lots of time by effectively painting the horse in one go as well as bits of the rider as well.

Apologies in advance for my persistent inability to plan ahead for proper lighting and backdrop for the pictures, but then again I wasn't planning to do this project at all. I should be painting Crusaders...

Stage 1 - Primer Coat
Figures were primed in several light coats using Army Painter's "Leather Brown" spray. This gave me a jump on stage 2, as the basic color for the horse and several pieces of equipment on the rider would be this brown color. I will remember to apply sand and grit to the bases of the other figures before priming to give me a head start on the final bases as well.

Stage 2 - Blocking in Basic Colors
The goal of this step would be to neatly but quickly paint the basic colors on the figure. This will be the prep work for "dipping" the figure in stage 3.

Undercloak and helmet - Vallejo Panzer Aces "Shadow Flesh".
Cloak - Vallejo Game extra opaque "Heavy Blackgreen".
Tunic - Vallejo Panzer Aces "Dark Rust".
Skin - Citadel Foundation "Tallarn Flesh".
Hair - Citadel "Bubonic Brown".
Armor - Citadel "Boltgun Metal".
Saddle blanket, horse harness, sword scabbard, boots, horse mane and tail - Citadel "Scorched Brown".
Primer coat of "Leather Brown" was left on the horse, bow, shin guards and quiver.

Stage 3 - The Dip
I have never done this before, but using a "dip" as a means of shading a figure certainly has a longstanding tradition in figure painting, and has become increasingly mainstream as a result of the Army Painter line of products. A "dip" is basically wood stain such as Minwax or the like in a brown tone of some sort. It is thin enough to flow into crevices and low spots on a figure to provide easy and effective shading while being thick enough to hold in those spots and not just run off like water. Some people actually grab a figure by the base, flip it over and dunk it into the stain. I chose to paint my dip onto the figure liberally using a 3/4 inch (big) brush. This was my first attempt at this, but it was easy and effective. The trick is to have a feel for getting enough dip on the figure to shade it properly while not being too heavy handed so as to obliterate it.


The dip - Army Painter Quickshade "Strong Tone".
One downside to me is that the dip dries very glossy. So much so that I couldn't continue with the painting (too distracting) until I had hit the figure with a light coat of matte varnish to knock down the gloss.

Stage 4 - First Highlight
The dip I used was a pretty dark tone, so my first highlight was in some cases applying a lighter tone to highlight certain areas, and in other cases simply reapplying the same base color to bring back a little of the original brightness of the color which had been dulled by the dip.

Clothing - The tunic, undercloak and outer cloak all used the original base color as a highlight to bring back some brightness on outer folds and exposed areas.
Horse - Citadel "Bestial Brown".
Skin - Citadel "Dwarf Flesh".
Hair - 50/50 mix of Citadel "Bubonic Brown" and "Bleached Bone".

Stage 5 - Final Highlight
These are intended to be the rank and file of the army, not display pieces or special characters, so I have no intention of lavishing a great amount of time or detail on them. That being said, one last round of highlights to make some detail and edges pop a little is in order.

Horse - Citadel "Snakebite Leather".
Undercloak - Vallejo Panzer Aces "Light Rust".
Cloak - Vallejo Panzer Aces "Italian Tankcrew".
Armor and Metal Details - Citadel "Shining Gold".
Horse tail and mane - drybrush of some light tan color that happened to be on my palette at the moment. Not sure what it was. A rust shade mixed with Bleached Bone I think.

Conclusions
So there you have it. It took me longer to flip through the Games Workshop books and catalogs looking at pictures to try to pick the right colors than it did to actually paint this sample figure. There is a nice little article on the GW site here that gives a step-by-step "how to" on painting one of these figures, but it is geared more towards a higher caliber of painting than I am aspiring to in this particular case. Too much highlighting and detail work, and too much paint mixing. One of the downsides of GW sticking to their own Citadel paint line is the need to spend way too much time mixing paint to fill gaps in their line. The rest of us can buy paints from other manufacturers.

Lastly, a few observations:

• For quick and effective shading on bulk troops, "the dip" may well be the way to go. I do think I will try the shade that is one notch lighter though.
• I have started adding Vallejo brand paints to my largely Citadel inventory and I absolutely love them! Great stuff. Nice flow and good coverage. Although at this point I have used mainly dark and neutral colors, so I am not sure how their paints in the typically difficult red/orange/yellow family perform.
• The plastic kits for the Lord of the Rings line have some ambiguous molding that makes it a little hard to know how to paint them in places. There are spots on the figures where I am not quite sure where one thing ends and another begins. This was true on this figure, and was a consistent issue for me when I painted a box of Moria goblins a while back. Citadel's metal figures never ever have this problem.
• I do love the Lord of the Rings. I freely admit it.
• I am convinced that following the basic plan outline above, I can complete the other 17 Riders of Rohan that are primed and ready to go in fairly short order. Well, fairly short order for me...

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.