"NZ Wars Week 2: painted Empress Miniatures Maori" Topic

Hello – just to say that I'm doing a series a post over the next few days about Empress Miniatures NZ Wars figures that I've been painting recently, probably with some other Kiwiana thrown in.

link

Thanks for looking. Any comments welcome.

Giles

Kei reira, Bro'! The lighter skin colour is very good. You need to do that with 28mm figures anyway, IMHO.

Robert

That greenstone club is particularly striking!

Looking very nice. Good job done with the tattoos and clothing as well.

Kia ora Giles. Kei reira ( awesome). Traditionally the ta moko can cover the nose as will

Nice paint job.

Can I ask though, are you getting your skin tone from pictures of modern maori, or 19th century maori.

Pictures of 19th century maori, who could be considered full blooded, appear to show a much deeper skin colour than modern maori possess. e.g. my wife, who is maori, has been mistaken for Greek by a Greek person, Italian by an Italian person, and Samoan by a Samoan person!
In fact, there is an understanding here in NZ that there are no full blooded maori left in the country today; they all have some element of pakeha blood. So modern maori are probably not the best guide for earlier skin tones.

Although of course, there is considerable variation within the modern range of skin tones, and I suspect there was a reasonable range of skin tones in pre-European maori culture.

Hope that has helped not hindered.

All – that for your comments. On the flesh, I fully appreciate that it is not perfect and could certainly be a bit darker. The reasons for my choice are: (1) practical ease – the Foundry palette I'm using is there, available and seems the best of the bunch; (2) as monk says, I use lighter-than-life colours on 25mm anyway; (3) a lighter flesh tone shows off the to moko more clearly and that to me is the thing that distinguishes these figures as maori; and (4) last but certainly not least, I remember seeing an exhibition of Lindauer portraits in Auckland a few years ago and I was surprised at how light he'd painted the maori skin on his maori portraits, or at least some of them – if you look at some of those, the colour I've used doesn't seem that far off…

Thanks for all the encouragement and comments.

Giles

Giles, I thought of those paintings after completing my post. Interesting, a lot of 19th century painters portray Maori flesh as quite light. I have often wondered if that is what they saw or wanted to see.

Doesn't matter, your figures look good and it takes courage to try and represent the moku. Good job.