A Little about Figure Style

On a different tack ......

I recently attended a rather enjoyable wargaming weekend to help with running a large C18th game, using Charles's Grant's excellent "The Wargame" rules (other rules sets are available, ......they're just not as good! )

Anyway, the after dinner drinks discussion ranged far and wide, but at one point touched on the fact that the Crann Tara style figures look like they have been on a starvation diet etc.

So, I thought I would do a small visual comparison, between a Crann Tara figure, an Old Front Rank I happen to have, and a scaled down image taken from a drawing book, created to illustrate typical human proportions. Now whilst I appreciate folks come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, it is a useful benchmark I would suggest.

At the end of the day, everyone has there own taste, and I can see why chunky, cartoon style figures are popular (they are so much easier to paint, the head alone being twice the size at least from what it should be), but I know which style looks better to me .... 😉

Finishing Off

With the bulk of the figure complete, it's time to finish by doing the final detail.

The musket is painted with a deep brown colour, then highlighted with a light tan/orange hued colour (I used Foundry Spearshaft 13c). I tend to do thin lines to give a suggestion of wood grain, it's totally out of scale, but seems to work. Metalwork is then painted in, using Coat d'arms 142 gun metal and Coat d'arms 220 silver for highlights. The gold is first painted Foundry Spearshaft 13a then overpainted with an acrylic gold. I find most metallic colours benefit with an undercoat of a base slightly darker flat acrylic colour underneath as they tend to be quite translucent and it helps give them depth.

Hair is painted all in an acrylic colour, like a light grey or light tan, then, once dry, washed over with a suitable oil colour (like Blue Black or Burnt Sienna respectively). Lastly the tricorne lace etc is painted, again, in this case, Spearshaft 13a as the base, with Foundry Ochre 4c as the top coat.

In all this detail work, it's important to leave a margin of a darker colour between surfaces, it helps to define the areas and makes it really "pop".

At this stage the figure is basically complete, all that's left to do is to deal with the fact that we have shiny and flat finishes at this point. An easy fix, which I'll describe next time.