Painting Table Saturday - Jan 18 - Knights

This week was a very busy one for everybody in the family, but I did manage to sneak in some little blocks of time in the evenings to make progress on my early medieval German knights. I am having fun with these, so it seems that the "someday I need to clean up those seven stands of old knights" has turned into "I'm doing that now."

I hope to get more done today. Amparo is at the high school all morning working on the costume crew for Les Miserables, and the kids just want to relax. I need to start cutting the wood for a furniture project that we are starting work on, and I am going to a concert tonight with friend Anthony down in Wilmington (The Musical Box, a Genesis tribute band), but that leaves some time today to goof off.

On the painting table now are 12 of the 21 old figures, along with some new ones I am adding (banners and lancers) to make up new stands that don't consist entirely of hand weapons. This batch is phase 1, and I will still need a few more lancers to make the six new stands shown here come out in the right proportion of figure types. The 8 figures already glued to the new stands are old figures that I am done brightening up.

Painting Table - Jan 18 at start

4 figures are still old dull ones that need to be refurbished. These are proving to be a decent amount of work, as I find myself substantially repainting each figure rather than just tidying things up and adding a little highlighting. These figures were painted for me by a guy in Ohio to a mediocre level of quality perhaps 12 years ago, and I liked them at the time, but they are nowhere near the standard I would expect now. They were basically painted a single color and given a brown wash for shading. Now they just look muddy and dull. I want bright (or brighter, at least).

Three old figures (in front)

Another old figure

The repainted figures don't look like a completely new one would, but they certainly are brighter than when they started, and are better shaded and highlighted. This is about as good as they will get without a complete re-paint, which I am not interested in doing. This is good enough.

Two sample refurbished figures

To make the new stands, I also need new figures - lancers and flag bearers. Below are five such figures that have been assembled, black primed, and have some of the basic color blocking already done. Lots of work left on these.

5 New figures in process (in front)

With everything else going on these days, we'll see how long it takes me to get through this batch, but it feels good to have a small project on the table that is able to get some attention. (I also plan to get some Hundred Years War gallery photos done over the weekend...).