It occurs to me that I didn’t really explain that King Charles was also a bit of a dick. The two main players really weren’t upstanding people. While Cromwell was a dick who ended up a dictator, the Civil War is really Charles’s fault.
Under the law at the time, Parliament only needed to be called under a few conditions – the most important of these being in order to raise taxes, which was effectively a measure to stop the Crown from starting wars without parliamentary approval. Wars are expensive, so it’s hard to pay for them without taxation. Charles, however, really hated parliament. He was the sort of king who wished the whole Magna Carta thing hadn’t happened (he got this idea from his dad).
Anyway, Charles so hated the idea of needing approval meant that he spent as much time as possible avoiding having to call Parliament, resulting in ten years or so of effectively absolute authority. Not that he actually achieved anything in this time, of course.
Anyway, that’s a brief history of why Charles is a dick, too. Back to paint.
Apologies for the graininess on the pics – it turns out WordPress is adding extra compression to my images, and this has a notable effect on this guy for some reason…
Anyway, I repainted his face, which now features some rather fetching facial hair, polished up the red a little more (still needs more work), painted his boots and royally cocked up his sleeves.
The sleeves are a good example of two problems in painting:
- Painting the colour rather than the material.
Materials reflect light in different ways, which you can see on this figure in the metal gorget thingummy and the boots: very different materials, very different highlighting and shading. The sleeves don’t have any real character and the paint isn’t showing a realistic interplay with the light. This is a pretty common problem for people who started out painting gaming figures. - Starting from the wrong base colour.
I’ve started with a base that’s too dark, which means the shading ends up muddy and indistinct, and the highlights have to be thick to cover the base colour, which makes them lumpy and clumsy.
So the sleeves need to be repainted, but otherwise he’s coming along nicely.
Fet Paints 