54mm face painting, Ice Viking in 28mm and some static grass

A mixed bag this week.  I spent the first part of it working on the face and hair of my 54mm knight figure.  There isn’t much flesh on the figure as the alternative head I choose has a beard.  So I went for my usual flesh range (dark to light) of

VPA Shadows Flesh
VMC Medium Flesh (base)
VMC Dark Flesh
VMC Flat Flesh
VGC Dead White

Yes, Medium Flesh is darker than Dark Flesh :)  I also usually add some dirt shadows with Earth or so other dark tan.  After all there wasn’t much washing in the middle ages.  I took the highlights beyond what I normally do (I have the Cancon painting classes with Meg Maples/Mark Soley to thank for that) and yes, it does look better.  At a few meters away the face really pops.  Not 100% on the right eye, I think it may have to move up slightly.  Never been good at eyes and my own eyes aren’t helping things as they get older.

Slightly over exposed there..

For the hair I tried something different and went for fully white hair.  Normally I do the standard brown or grey.  The base colour was a warm off white (i.e. looked a bit yellow) VMC Light Sand.  Rather than do my 28mm hair technique of doing a dark wash followed by some dry brushing I tried to paint the entire hair as one piece, much like painting an irregular shaped sphere.  Another technique picked up thanks to the internet.  This was helped as the sculpt had the hair in waves down the head.  I medieval perm job.  On the underside of hair wave I shaded down with a tan yellow to brown and on the top of the waves I highlighted up with flat white to gloss white.  The end result was a little harsh on the shadows, so I need to go back and have another go.  But this is the way to paint hair so it looks like hair rather than strands of straw.

Still not being sure of the main colours for the knight I did a test figure using an old Ral Partha 28mm figure.  I went for a cool (blue) white for his shirt and a light blue for the cloak.  For the flesh I went for a lighter nordic skin colour and made the VMC Dark Flesh the base.  For the white tunic my range was

VGC Ghost Grey + VGC Dead White
VGC Dead White
VMC Gloss White
VMA White - I find the airbrush range white is great.  Very bright but totally smooth.

For the blue cloak the range was

VGC Magic Blue
AP Electric Blue (the lightest blue I had)
VGC Dead White
VMA White


So a “grey white” and “blue white” combo.  The blue cloak was too dark for what I was aiming for.

The final highlights of white are too extreme next to the Magic Blue.  Next time I will start with a lighter blue.  I’m also going to trial some snow effects for the first time on his base.  I’m not sure if the 54mm knight will have snow but currently he is looking like being a very cold colour scheme so the snow would add to that.

I’ve been doing some reading of various learn to paint oils/acrylics/etc books to expand and improve my skill set.  Something I picked up was that it is almost impossible to make a colour lighter and brighter by mixing.  By adding white you make the colour lighter/whiter but adding white always makes the colour duller.  Mixing any two colours will always also result in a colour darker than the lightest.  This is because paint is colour subtractive.  So for really light colours you need to buy them.  So after 30mins of trying to make a blue lighter and brighter than the AP Electric Blue I found those books know what they are on about.  I could get a lighter blue, but it was dull as.  Luckily I’m 5 mins away from The Combat Company so I went and grabbed a pot of VMC Sky Blue.  This is all going towards doing the cloak of the knight as a faded out blue.  So a very light blue base up to white/linen due to sun fade and weather.

Finally in all that excitement I finished off the bases of my two Flemish warriors with my usual dirt mix, flock and static grass.  More recently I’ve started to paint the grass tufts a few different greens and yellows to break up the uniformity.  Green base rims just to kick it old school.