Start of a Panoceania Force

I was quite pleased with how Gargazone the Panoceania trooper turned out, so since my last update I’ve painted his compatriots to form a core group of cheap troopers to use for most of my Panoceania lists. As it stands this is three Fusiliers and three Kamau troopers as seen below.

I try to emphasize getting whole armies finished I use an extremely simple 3-tier Base/Ink/Highlight format for all of my miniatures that totally cuts out any layering. While I’m aware that this will always hold me back from achieving a really stunning paintjob, for now I’m just happy to work through lots of minis with this format as I get better with color co-ordination, brush control, and end up with lots of armies that I can play with.

However in an effort to get the most out of this simple system I’ve purposely experimented a bit with my inking techniques for the mint-green color on these figures to try and get the best result. Below is the first trooper (Gargazone) that I painted, in which my ink wash went over every part of the initial mint-green basecoat. As you can see this results in the highlights really standing out quite a bit, which I like. Yet at the same time it can make the non-highlighted portions look a little muddied or inconsistent and this is something that’s always frustrated me.

To that end I attempted to do my ink wash FIRST over the white primer and then do my mint-green basecoat afterwards on this guy, trying to leave the darkened areas produced by the wash alone. I’m not really happy with this method at all, as the highlights seem a little washed out, but more significantly the initial basecoat which is always SO IMPORTANT in making a figure look good is really inconsistent in its coverage as I tried to avoid the darkened areas. I could see this looking alright with models that have really clearly defined dark/light areas but on the highly detailed truescale infinity figures it just doesn’t cut the mustard. (at least at my skill level)

Finally I’ve found a technique that I’m quite happy with here, which is to ink after the initial basecoast as per usual, but only do so in the shaded areas that require definition and try to leave raised areas ink-free as much as possible. This resulted in a deep contrast with the shading against a much cleaner looking bulk of the armor that I really like. Admittedly the highlighting remains a little more subtle here but the basecoat looks so much cleaner, and has more overall pop, that I don’t mind at all.

And for the record yes, that Fusilier has a full Burt-Reynolds-style mustache, and I am SO incredibly pleased about it. I also started to highlight the red with a bright orange, rather than toning it up by mixing in white, which I find comes out too pinkish. I’m not 100% happy with the red yet but I’ll continue to work on it. I think my problem stems from using a very bright red as a base color.

Here's the remainder of my PanO force to assemble and paint! I love that infinity is conducive to these elegant little armies.