Town Gossip

Hey folks,

I know it´s been a while since my last post and even longer since putting in content on a regular basis. I´ve not been idle in the last few months, but my output has been slightly reduced recently.

However, as I didn´t put anything here, there´s a batch of figures just waiting to be photographed and uploaded - and that´s exactly what I did this morning. So, I´m finally able to present to you the results of the last few months of irregular painting sessions throughout the next few days.

I´ll be starting today with a group of Elhiem Afghan Civilians, very nice minis and a pleasure to paint.

As I experimented with new techniques and painting styles, I found that the usual strategy of basecoating, washing and re-highlighting started to annoy me, no matter if the wash was oil wash or regular acrylic wash.

So I started manual shading, i.e. painting the shades with the brush instead, and I think I´ll stick to it. It gives so much more control over washes and allows me to use several hues of color on different parts of the minis. Some tutorials for traditional 2D-arts and some deeper understanding of color theory laid a solid foundation for these experiments - and I can only recommend the aspiring painters to delve into these topics, it will greatly enhance your painting!

My initial concern was that it might take too long to invest brushwork into hand-painting shadows. But after doing quite a large batch of figures without using any washes, I don´t think that´s true. The fact that you´re saving the entire step of re-applying the basecoat over your wash pretty much compensates for the time required to paint shadows.  Furthermore,  don´t have to wait for the wash to dry to continue working. 
It´s probably NOT an assembly-line technique for finishing an entire platoon in a day, but the end result looks much cleaner and better and you can finish even larger forces pretty quickly.

Throughout the next days, I´ll be showing you some Soviets, of which only 4 or 5 figures were painted with a wash before I switched to the other style. All of these were painted within a few painting sessions spread over about 2 weeks.

Stay tuned!