"First ECW Troops" Topic

My group has decided to venture into doing some ECW battles. So I painted up a unit for the group to use.
I also used the Army Painter Method to paint these. My blog post details how they turned out.
link

You can do better.

To my eyes that's a very good start now you need to paint in the detail to make the paint job make sense i.e. to eradicate the blue undercoat from where you don't want it. TBH I don't see what you've gained by priming blue – it seems to have created a whole load of work.

To be honest I quite like the effect.

Nice, so you'll prime each unit in the base color?

Sorry. Not a fan of your method but…I would like to see what they look like en masse. If I had to paint 200 figures in one week this might be the way to go.

Nnascati,

Yes, the premise is you prime the figures in uniform color and then paint the details. I'm not totally sold on this method but if I had to do a bunch of figures quickly then I would probably do it this way or I should plan better and give myself time to paint them correctly. :-)

You have bits of blue undercoat coming through every where. You might get a better result with a brown undercoat. What Timmo said really.

Over all if they were mine I'd now go back and finish them off by painting in the detail. Try one and you will see what I mean.

Not a fan of brown army painter on blue. I would follow suggestions above re repainting over the blue undercoat, which is showing through in places and, for future figures, use a wash which is appropriate (I find Future Klear polish with black acrylic ink added makes a good general purpose wash for most colours. It is also easy to make custom washes for colours where black is not the most appropriate).
I share your frustration with plastic figures- I gave a box away because they were driving me mad trying to assemble. I use Metal figures now, preferably one piece types.

I quite like the idea of priming with the base uniform colour as a principle, especially if there is a lot of that uniform, so priming `Austrians White and Confederates grey is brilliant.

Once primed, I apply a heavy coat of ink and then go back in and rescue the the highlights of the primer colour (in this case blue).

The block paint that follows needs to kill all of the surplus primer (blue).

The choice of shading is an individual decision, at this stage, I would tend to selectively ink parts of the figure and then go back in with a fast highlight.

You have chosen to poly dip, and the two problems as I see it is that the dip went on too thickly and has 'dirtied' the figure too much and the dip tends to 'bronze' some colours ….. blue being one such colour.

I am also guessing that in your efforts to get the excess dip off, you have also taken away some of the block painting, to reveal blue primer.

I think the process is worth staying with for 'speed painting' and that the technique perhaps needs tweaking rather than abandoning.

I know some people put KLEAR on their figure before inking / dipping to reduce the effect of dips sticking to high areas (caused by the excellent tooth that acrylics offer!)

good post and thanks for sharing, I think this sort of thing really helps gamers.

Dark tone is the appropriate Quickshade for cold colours, and would have worked better on the armour, too (a less rusty effect). It contains more black.

If you'd combined it with lighter shades of brown on leather items and trousers the shading effect there would have been superior to that achieved.

Finally, it's worth going back with a small brush dampened with thinner/turps and removing dip from the most raised detail to create highlights, especially on bright colours. You just have to remember to retouch these areas with clear gloss varnish.

I was unaware of that for using the Quickshades.