Huzzah For the Wellingtonians!
Date: November 06, 2008.
Part 1
Wow! I say WOW! The new HäT testshots of the Peninsular British Infantry came in the mail a week ago and I went to work on them right away. They are well worth the long wait. Now when waiting for the basecoat to dry I realised that my former WIP shoots were all actually only building-WIP's. This time I will do this WIP about how I paint my miniatures.
Step 1
As always the first step is to remove the parts from the sprue and clean them up. I'll just skip this one as I have done that in the last 2 shoots already. I have taken one figure of each pose and had to decide which of the flank company poses I wanted to be Light Bobs and which will be the Grenadiers. My choices will become apparent later on in this shoot!
The basecoated Brits (showing only the flank company poses).
Step 2
The first thing I always do is pick out the skin of the figures in Bestial Brown (Games Workshop)
Step 3
The next stage is applying the main colours of the uniform, in this case that would be red. Anyway here's the first layer of red for the jacket: I use Valejo Cavalry Brown (V982) as a base.
The trousers would normally be white (early period) or blue-grey (post 1812 regulations) but since this set is oriented around the Peninsular War I decided to go for a mix of colours. I did some white, some grey, some brown and even one in red (nicked that from the Foundry site). Here's a pic for the grey Valejo Dark Sea Blue (V898) one (all greatcoat rolls are done just like the grey trousers) .
Here you can see the highlighted grey trousers (done by adding Pale Sand)
As said I also did some poses with brown trousers. The base colour for these is Valejo Leather Brown (V871) the highlights were done by adding Valejo Pale Sand (V837) to the mix.
Step 4
The picture below shows the backpack. For these I also chose the earlier version. The British army used a kind of canvas envelope for their backpacks prior to the adaptation of the Trotter backpack. The figures offer options for both as they have straps over the backpack (which I cut away) to indicate the Trotter version but also have very detailed sides which show the folded canvas sides of the earlier version. These canvas backpacks often showed the regimental facing colour with some kind of badge. Since I mean to depict the 87th Regiment of Foot which carried green facings these backpacks (and all collars and cuffs) were painted in Valejo Black Green (V980) and successive highlights were obtained by first mixing in Valejo Deep Yellow (V915) and Pale Sand. The Light Infantry plumes were based Black Green at this stage as well.
The next phase is the basing of all white areas. I used a base of Snakebite Leather (Games Workshop). Afterwards all jackets are painted with Scab Red (Games Workshop)
Step 5
The canteens are being painted Valejo Intense Blue (V925)
Step 6
Okay on to the skin and some finer details. I highlighted the skin with a mix of Bestial Brown and Valejo Medium Flesh in about 1:2 parts. This doesn't really show up on the picture but trust me I did it all the same! Next up are the NCO's and the officer; the sashes were given a basecoat of Scab Red and Intense blue in a 4:1 parts ratio. The highlight was done by using pure Scab Red. The NCO's sashes received a centre line of Black Green highlighted (as were all other green parts) by a mix of Black Green and Deep Yellow.
Step 7
A layer of Pale Sand was added to all "white" areas.
Finally to conclude Part I of this tutorial a picture of all the chappies on my desk!
I hope you have found this WIP at least a bit helpful and will gladly answer any questions in the forum.
Cheers Sander!
Many thanks to Mr. van Straeten.
The Netherlands