"Painting small scale Napoleonic Prussians" Topic

any advice on what Vallejo or others paint range colors to use for painting 6mm/10mm Napoleonic Prussians, looked at some Prussian blues and they seem rather dark for painting small scales

I will be painting infantry, artillery and dragoons if it helps

I have come to the conclusion that its best to pick a lighter shade than the IRL colour when painting 6mm. So you are probably right that the Prussian blue is rather dark, unless you use it as a base colour and then highlight it.

I don't understand the justification for that at all – painting things lighter based on their size.

Show pics to make your point please.

Flashman, well established fact but you really have to try it to see that it is true.

It is about visual perception and photos don't always make the effect clear.

At 10mm I'd tend to rely more on the highlight method but in 6mm, although highlighting works fine, I'd go a lighter shade.

I tend to do Prussians with a duller colour than French, even though the real uniforms were little different in colour. Just to make them distinct.

Hi Flashman14

It works for me painting my 6mm in a slightly light shade, I get a look that I think feels right on the tabletop. But thats just my opinion and I'm not sure I can claim "feels right" as my justification.

If you paint your 6mm in the "correct" colour and are pleased with the look you get, then thats great.

What's the origin of this? I'm very much open to persuasion on it.

For those of you who swear by the method, I'm just looking for any kind of evidence. Show me an ideal example of it. For so many people sold on the result it should be easy to take a pic or two. Let the fence sitters be the judge.

Google 'Scale Effect'.

JoesShop, that was interesting, never thought of that, look what I found, there seems to be some science hidden behind my "feels right"…

http://www.cybermodeler.com/color/scale_effect.shtml

Of course there is science behind it, its about how objects are perceived rather than their actual appearance. Looking at a scaled down version of something has a similar effect to seeing that object a greater distance away. Think about how colours tend to get more muted with distance and you will understand the basic principle.

On my 28mm Calpe Prussians I used Liquitex Prussian Blue.
As a highlight, I use this with a 1 to 1 Prussian blue and a light blue. You may want to try the lighter one for your 6mm figures.

Fair enough; I concede it's a thing.

But how are you executing this phenomenon? Let's see the pics!

I used the Vallejo Aquamarine Blue on my 6mm Prussians and I think it worked reasonably well, even if it is not exactly a Prussian Blue.

I don't know how to post pictures.

At distance all colours in the spectrum converge on grey because that is the colour of the intervening water vapour in the air.

It follows that to achieve accuracy you should consider adding light grey to the base shade.

I lack the grasp of physics to work out what the scale matting effect of distance is. A car that looks shiny 10 feet away does not look shiny 150 yards away, and similarly, a 1/32 model car should not be in full scale gloss paint. Probably there is a way to work out how much less glossy 1/32 reflected light would appear.

I think the way to explain the need to use lighter colours for smaller figure might be the following.

o For simplicity, think of the object as a light source, so we don't need to consider the complications of reflected light, the colour spectrum of the light shining on the object and such things. Also, there is no need (for the explanation) to explain that the color perceived by our eyeballs is a mixture of wavelengths and is further filtered by our eye's different power of response by wavelength or our brain's filtering as well.

o Light can be scientifically described as a particle (a "photon") of a certain energy, moving at the speed of light. Put a photo detector in a faint light source and you can count the particles hitting it. OR it can be described as in-phase perpendicular magnetic and electrical fields of a certain frequency traveling at the speed of light. It is both at the same time and scientists use whatever representation that works best for solving whatever problem they are dealing with. Let's just consider it a energy particle.

o Okay, now that that is over, consider our object is emitting 100 photons (of a certain energy) to your eyeball. If you are close, your eyeball gets hit with all 100. What happens if you are far away? A number of those photons hit something on they way to your eyeball. It might be a dust particle or a water droplet or a molecule of something. It might bounce off the dust particle and change direction. Or it might be absorbed by that thing and heat it up. Or it might be absorbed by that thing for an instant, then that thing decides it doesn't want to absorb it and re-emitted in a variety of other directions. ("light scattering or Raman scattering). ANYWAY what hits your eyeball is not 100 of the colored photos but maybe 70 or 80 (or whatever)- fewer of them. Also coming into your eye (apparently from the same direction) is a lot of light from other sources that got scattered to your eye from other places but gets mixed in with those 70 to 80 colored photons. These are a random, broad spectrum- basically a white light. So the color looks less intense.

So if you are far from a big object, then its color is less intense. If you are using a small 10mm, 6mm or 3 mm figure, then your brain tells you it is far away and should appear as a lighter color.

(4th curisassier: water vapor is colour-less. It doesn't absorb or emit anything in the visible spectrum. )

Unless you are the moon of course……..

Distances become far harder to judge and colours are sharper, or would be if the whole place was not an ash grey finish anyway.

Future wargamers may well get away with ignoring the scale effect