Fet Paints

The Occitan knight is now basically complete. I could leave him in this state and happily take him to shows, but I want to make him look more like he’s living in the midst of a siege. To that end, I’ll be adding dust, dirt, little scrapes and so on. In the meantime, here he is all clean and sort of shiny:

Actually putting his arms on wasn’t quite as simple as I’d hoped. Somewhere between doing a test fit before I painted him and now, his shield arm decided that it no longer wanted to slot into place, so I had to fill a bit of a gap in his upper arm and sculpt in some chainmail. Thankfully, the chainmail as sculpted here isn’t insanely detailed, so I just had to poke some putty a bit to make it work.

The shield itself I decided to paint with a fair bit of texture, which had a couple of advantages:

1. It makes it look like it’s seen some use. If not stopping swords and arrows, perhaps bashing people in the face.
2. It made it really quick to paint. Large flat surfaces like shields can take a lot of effort to blend, especially if it’s aligned roughly vertically, as it is here. A textured surface doesn’t need that sort of perfection, so you can get through it a lot faster.

The final highlights are still a little harsh, but I’m hoping the dust and scratches will sort that out. I may also glaze in some extra tones to smooth it over a touch.

Also, I am now very sick of crosses.

Some more progress on the Occitan knight, who has gained some lovely plates on his shoulders (so in vogue this season) to complement his swanky new crosses and a sword at his hip.

His base has also been worked on, and I’m really pleased with how the colours have come out. I’ll enhance the green/moss a little, and add some pigments for dust that I’ll also scatter over his feet/lower legs and just a little up his tabard (don’t want to completely undo all the work I’ve done there – less is more for dirt and dust in this instance).

His crosses came out reasonably well, but I need to give them a little bit of darklining to accentuate the shape and sharpen things, and to make it look more like something attached to the tabard (presumably sewn on) rather than painted.

With the Duke of Bavaria show coming up in a few weeks, I’m hoping I can get him done to a standard I’ll be happy to show off. I had a look over my other entries last week, and saw that I have quite a few pieces to take along – some more accomplished than others, but as the show works on a display basis, I’m not paying extra to take pieces that someone might get a kick out of.

It’s been a quiet couple of weeks as various duties have kept me away from the brushes, but I’ve finally managed to get some more done on the French knight, and it’s really nice to see how the model is developing.

A couple of weeks ago, I also saw that Marc Mussat had recently painted a knight wearing the Occitan cross. This reassures me that I’m not going completely wrong with the colour, cross, etc. It’s also nice to see that the cross looks pretty cool on a figure – sometimes you work on a bit of freehand that looks great in the real world but it just doesn’t transfer to the scale of the model.

Anyway, here’s where I’ve got to:

As you can see, I started doing the first cross on his back, but there were disturbances at the painting table. As I’ve previously mentioned, I do most of my painting at Inner Sanctum in Cambridge, which is unfortunately hugely popular with card gamers. Without meaning to disparage all card gamers (I do know some that are perfectly courteous), I’m sure most people in the hobby have had experiences with the type that are apparently oblivious to their surroundings – in this instance, they were banging the table and one person next to me decided they wouldn’t take their backpack off, so every time they turned I was battered by a bag that might have been full of bricks.

Anyway, there’s a lot more I could say about the card gamers at Inner Sanctum, but people who have been there know what they’re like. Back to the paint.

As you can see, I’ve added the yellow trim, which is sort of based on this guy’s outfit. Adding the little spacer around the yellow I think gives it a little more structure and makes it look like something that someone has actually made rather than simply being paint over a surface. The strip showing on the inside of his skirt would probably not exist, of course, but I think it would look like it was missing without it.

Once I get the crosses on, he’ll then be ready to get his arms, which is terribly exciting.

I know I should steer away from saucy or titillating titles like this, but it’s hard to resist. A merkin, for those lucky enough not to have heard of them before, is a pubic wig. Women used to wear them if they’d had to shave due to lice, or for other reasons that are entirely their own business. Men probably thought they were hilarious to glue to their chins. I refer to them here because the process of putting grass onto Jeremiah’s base had it looking suspiciously like a merkin was involved.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture at that stage, but needless to say a mat of grass that’s been sprayed brown and lightly glued onto a base is just a little suggestive.

Anyway, that stage has now been passed (I hope) and Jeremiah is basically finished:

I just need to add a couple of little details and then he’ll be finished.

The grass itself is a product I picked up years ago because I don’t really like the look of grass tufts in some instances. Here, for instance, longer grass is more suitable to make the grave appear neglected.

If you’re interested in the product, it’s Heki Wild Grass, which comes in a sort of sheet mesh and is probably intended for model railways or large dioramas. I usually cut off a section slightly larger than I need, airbrush any extra colour I’d like onto it, then glue it down with PVA. This is when it looks like a merkin. To make it look more like it’s actually growing out of the ground, I poke it around with some thinned PVA, pressing it into the base and sort of sculpting tufts or movement as I go. Once that’s dry, it’ll often be a little glossy, so I airbrush it again to put the light in place, then have a go at it with nail scissors to vary the length and make it more natural.

All in all, I think it’s a pretty effective product for this sort of grass.

Up next: the skirt. This isn’t nearly as saucy, and it should be pretty obvious what I mean:

I’m really quite happy with how he’s coming along – the red sets the other parts off nicely, and the blending isn’t too rough. For anyone interested (because red can be a real pain in the arse), the red is done with only three colours: GW’s old Mechrite Red (one of the foundation paints), highlighted with VMC Sunny Skintone, and shaded with GW’s old Scaly Green. Easy peasy.

Up next will be the top half of his surcoat, Occitan crosses, then the belts and straps, then I can give him his arms. Lucky chap.

I haven’t yet decided what I’m doing with his helmet – I’d ordinarily go straight for metal, but the box art has it in the same colour as his surcoat, which is also pretty tempting.

I was hoping to have more to show on Jeremiah’s base, but it’s taking a wee while because my airbrush is ancient and not terribly great – I should really get a new one, but I only use it for undercoating a few other messy tasks like basing (in this instance, painting some grass brown).

That means I have, however, put a bit of work in on the French knight. Primarily, as you might guess from the title, his chainmail.

As you can guess, this isn’t the most exciting job in the world, but I thought I’d take a slightly different approach from my usual method.

Normally, I begin with a dark grey to provide a good base for the metallic (and to make sure any annoying spots that I miss later are naturally shaded), then use the metallic as the base colour, shading and highlighting accordingly. This time, I decided to instead use the dark grey as the base and reserved the metallic for the highlights. It was an enjoyable experiment, and I’m pretty happy with the result.

One of the key benefits was that I had a bit more control over the light than I feel I normally do, because I often end up with irritating spots of metal in the shadows that I’ve missed, or where the glazes have been slightly uneven. I generally like my metals to have quite matte shading to make the most of the contrast between light (which, for metal, is shiny and reflective) and dark. With this method, however, I was able to use inks in the shading to go from satin in the darkest shadows to matte in the midtones to reflective on the highlights. This gives the forms a bit more ‘volume’, as it were. I also finished up with a little matte spot highlighting, which is a trick I picked up many, many years ago to get sharper, more distinct highlights on metal.

Of course, when you’re taking a picture of basically greyscale over a greyscale undercoat in front of a greyscale backdrop, you lose something. There’s a bit of brown and green in the chainmail, too (for extra contrast and interest), but that’s all disappeared.

As you can see, I also painted his face, which I have to say is really excellently sculpted. It was a bit of pain to work on because of the noseguard (my own fault, but I know what would have happened if I tried to glue it on once the face was painted…) and trying to wrangle a chunk of wood and resin around, but I think it’s come out well. Not that it’s easy to tell from the photos, of course…