Dirty Paint Pots

I'll apologise in advance as this is probably not very interesting to most people. But I have spent the evening trying out a new painting style (for me anyway) and thought I would share.

Basically I am going to be assembling a Covenanter ECW army in 28mm in the near future. I already have some figures, as per my earlier post, but I was concerned that my usual painting method of starting with a dark colour and lightening it up to a highlight (usually over 4 to 5 coats for a war-gaming figure, if I was painting a one of figure for my mini cabinet it might be way more) would result in me taking just way way to long to assemble the force. My fear was also that this technique would result in me suffering with project fatigue quite quickly.

So having spent some time looking over some Blogs and the usual hordes of information online I noticed that a lot of people seem to use the Tri-Colour technique to paint big groups of figures. What you  see above is an hour or so's messing around with some figures testing out the colour Grey using the Tri-Colour concept.

I don't have a proper "Tri- Colour" set so I just picked three Grey's from my paint collection that looked like a reasonable match. As such the finish will never look right on the above figures as the paints I have used are just that little bit to far apart tonally, but it let me try the technique and I can see if I am failing technically without needing the right colours.

(Yes I know this is basically a post about me painting Grey on trousers 5 times, dull huh)

So my first attempt at the technique is on the far right labeled as 1 and the last attempt is number 5 on the far left. Some close ups below. There pretty rough as this was just to try the technique not paint a figure for display or anything. Also I have only painted the trousers on each figure so the rest of the figure is just undercoat.




Now I think number 5 shows promise technically speaking as I think I have broadly grasped the way this Tri-Colour thingy should work. It's not super pretty or anything but I think with the right Tri-Colour set applied in this way I can quickly produce  blocks of ECW infantry that look pretty good, and will certainly meet the 2 feet does it look good on the table test.

As I said before colour wise this test set were doomed never to look right as I just didn't have colours that matched closely enough, but I think its enough to tell if I am getting it right or not.

If anyone has made it this far, thanks for reading, and if you have any comments, tips etc regarding Tri-Colour please do leave a comment.

Thanks

At the request of a chap over on GWP I have prepared a short tutorial for how I painted CS95 trousers on an empress modern.

1. Undercoated the model as normal in my undercoat of choice, Halfords Grey Primer

2. Main colour blocked in with GW Knarloc Green, in reality CS95 is a bit darker than this but I am happy with the colour.

3. Main colour is highlighted up using a lighter shade of Knarloc Green, then add shadows using GW Badab Black Ink.

Thats the main bits (ie simple bits) out the way. Now I am lucky enough ( depending on your point of view) to have a pair of CS95's to refer too. If you google pictures of the pattern you will see that the main green has blocks of yellow, and then dark brown colour strips followed by black linking the three. The pictures are the best way I have of describing how to paint the 3 colours. However general advice is that the lines are never straight, and that the yellow should be thin, the brown should be thicker and the black lines should pass through all the other colours.

4. Yellow stripes are added these are not very thick and should not be straight also try not to repeat the shape of a line to much, and try and change there orientation on the trousers, ie not just up and down paint left to right, at an angle etc as well.

5. The brown is then added, this should cover over sections of the yellow, the lines should be thicker and almost blotchy in some places, again try and keep the pattern random, and vary the position, direction of the line.

6. Up until this point the pattern all looks a bit cack. However now add the black lines, which should be quite thin and pass through all three colours, ie each line should transcend a green, yellow and brown section. check out pictures of CS95 to make this clearer. Obviously there will be occasions where it will not be possible for the black to cross all the colours, just do your best.

And that is basically it, I think this method produces a good looking camouflage pattern which is a good representation of CS95. Hope that is of help to some people. The above model, but completed is below.