Saturday, October 26, 2013

The Swedes are Coming!

These took forever, despite the rather simple color scheme. My colors (particularly the shade of yellow) might not match everyone's conception, but I based my paint selection on a number of sources, illustrations and photographs of actual uniforms (which have undoubtedly faded quite a bit over time). 

Most of the regular Swedish infantry regiments wore blue coats with yellow facings by the 1700s. I will probably paint all of mine this way:



One issue I had was the blue coat over the the black base - it was very dark. I painted white over the coat, and then blue, and the result was marginally better. From a time perspective, it adds substantial time per figure and I'm not sure I'm willing to do that. 

The next 6, I'll do without the white and see what the result is with multiple coats of blue.

2 comments:

  1. I've found that the black base coat really muted the colors. Great for Dark Age stuff but not if you want flamboyant color. Your yellow came out pretty good, I had a lot of trouble with yellow and flesh over black. I had to use yellow ochre first.

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  2. For red, yellow and flesh, I paint an under coat of brown (or recently, lt. cinnamon as the last 2 bottles of dark brown Ceramcoate I purchased were terrible) on top of the black basecoat. For white, I undercoat in a very light grey (not for the lace on the hats though, just for leggings and such (like on my GNW Russians).

    Painting the coats with a white undercoat over the black, before painting the blue, looks fine to my eyes (which is what the picture above is of), but painting the coat white adds a bit of time for the improvement. There might be a further improvement by going from white over black, to just a white basecoat, and I'll test that out on another batch of 6 figures.

    My biggest resistance to white basecoats, besides the fact that I like a black line between colors on my 1/72 stuff, is that every misses spot, no matter how seemingly microscopic becomes like a glaring sun to me - usually I discover these during a game while taking pictures, when correcting it is inconvenient.


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