Plastic Adventures

Following the start of my PanOceania force I’ve been preparing to return to Fantasy and 40k as a hobbyist after a four year hiatus from any Games Workshop products. Like many miniature wargamers I have serious issues with the behavior of GW as a business, yet the appeal and quality of their systems manages to outweigh my feelings towards the company. There may come a day when this is no longer the case, but as it stands I’ve been enjoying supporting my local LGS by preparing to assemble a small force of 1000pts for both Fantasy and 40k. It’s been an absolute dream to assemble plastic instead of metal after eight months of pinning Infinity figures, as well as painting on the broad oceanic expanses of heroic scale figures.

As it stands I’ve been constructing an Empire battalion and have been experimenting with an altered paint scheme to distinguish my newly painted units from those of four years ago. At the same time I want to keep the army cohesive enough that they look good on the tabletop, so I’ll be keeping the dreaded yellow as cross-color between the two forces and replace the blue with a deep purple.

Using some old state troopers I had lying around I tried a couple different shades and techniques. Below are two different yellow base-coats over a white primer.

Vallejo Golden Yellow on the left, Army Painter Demonic Yellow on the right.

I’ve decided upon the left (Vallejo Golden Yellow) as the base, due to its better coverage and the appeal of having the yellow be slightly toned down. The contrast with the purple makes the Golden Yellow look really rich, despite it being a very creamy tone that I’m sure would look washed out with a different scheme. Furthermore it looks great when it’s given a slightly more intense shade by a yellow ink wash as seen below, compared to the brighter yellow which just gets muddied. I’m still not sure how I’m going to highlight it though, I might even end up just leaving the yellow alone after the wash if I can’t figure out a way to do it!

Both the Vallejo (left) and Army Painter (right) after a GW Casandora Yellow ink wash.

And here's a little Tau teaser for my 40k force!

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.