Thursday, November 5, 2009

Paint Machine Project No. 1 - (PM01) Romans

I'm going to do a series of Paint Machine Projects. For each one I will try to push my painting speed while trying not to make too many sacrifices to quality. Although this first Project will help me set a bit of a benchmark, I am still trying to pick up the pace from the past batch of figures I recently finished.

My guess is that I can paint the 18 figures in around 10 hours (600 minutes). I will post my time at each stage, and keep a running total.

I'm working on Late Republican Romans, and have a boatload of plastic legionaries from Wargames Factory to paint for the basis of the army/armies. Some of the peripheral troops may come later. Each unit of legionaries is a group of 18 figures, including 4 "command" figures.

For the purposes of the Paint Machine, the figures are already cleaned, assembled & primed. In this case, the primer is a little rough. These were some of the last figures I primed using Armory black primer, which came out very grainy. That is a discussion for elsewhere, however. On with the painting!

Tonight was flesh night.



Painting flesh is almost always the first thing I do. It's also the messiest. I don't know if it's just the enthusiasm for starting a new project, or just the fact that there's nothing else painted on the figure to "mess up" if I work sloppy. But it works for me.

I've always been able to find good flesh colors with good coverage in the craft store brands, like the one above. They last for a long time as well. Above is the base coat.

Step One: 30 min.
Total: 30 min.




I follow that with a slightly diluted (with clean water) wash using GW's old Flesh Wash. This is now out of production and is like gold to me. I've got another bottle or two horded away and haven't yet figured out what I will do when I run out.

I've wondered if these first two steps could just be combined by using a darker base coat, but the Flesh Wash really does provide a nice gradient, even if I do end up layering on top of some of it.

Step 2: 10 min.
Total: 40 min.




Next comes a highlight of the raised & top areas with the original flesh color. I try to keep this fairly quick & not worry too much over minute precision.

Step Three: 16 min.
Total: 56 min.



I took a shortcut here. This is really two steps. The first (Step Four) is to give one more highlight to the uppermost portions of the flesh and any other spots I want to pick out. I used a mix of slightly the original flesh mixed with white. My guess is that I used about 30-40% white at most. The second (Step Five) was to put a tiny bit of straight Flesh Wash into each eye socket in preparation for painting the eyes.

Step Four: 10 min.
Step Five: 2 min.
Total: 78 min.

1 comment:

  1. Interesting idea on seeing just how fast you can paint. I never kept track of my time before while I paint. I will be watching this blog very closely, keep it up man.

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