2 - Primary Colors for the Senators

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Ramiro Peira of PaintingPRO writes:

I'm grateful that TMP invited me to be part of the Simian Army Project. The two Simian Senators for 100K arrived at my studio several weeks ago.

First of all, I want to explain who I am and what I do. My name is Ramiro Peira and I'm from Argentina. I'm the owner and painter of PaintingPRO, a painting services company that I created some years ago. Slowly but surely, the company has grown - but still needs improvement. Especially our website, which has too many spelling errors (I'm not good at English).

Planning colours and effects

The first thing that I do - before starting to work on a figure - is to draw it on paper. I imagine and think about what colours would be appropriate to use. In this case, I know that actual Roman Senators wore white robes with black-and-golden details. They used red as a final color. The Simian Senators are part of an army that will have a violet color scheme, so I think that violet should be used at least on one of the two miniatures.

Assembling and Priming

The first step is to remove all the visible flash. On the Senators, there were some flaws which were impossible to remove - the mold wasn't perfectly aligned, so some strange lines are easily seen. An advanced sculptor can fix that with putty, which I used to fill the holes below the feet between the miniature and the base.

Before painting, I gave the miniature a primer coat of Painter's Touch, an excellent dull white spray paint, which gives the miniature a better surface for the paint to adhere to. This first coat should be carefully applied, because it's difficult to remove and too much paint could cover some details.

Unfortunately, there are no pictures of this step because of an error with the camera (sorry!).

Materials used to paint the figures

Brushes:

• Revell brush (Rotmarder Painta Luxxus 000)
• Winsor & Newton (0) brush
• Casan Brushes (1)
• A cheap brush (4) to paint the bases

Paints:

• Citadel
• Winsor & Newton Galeria
• Vallejo (just a Transparent Red to use on a gem)
• Tenier's

Inks:

• Inks are all from Citadel except for the black one I used. It's a cheaper brand, but it's exactly the same ink and it costs 6 times less!

Glazes:

• Just a red glaze was applied to the red gem. I tried to buy violet glaze for the other gem, but the store was sold out.

Other Elements:

• Fine sandpaper
• File
• Putty
• Absorbent paper to dry the brush
• Dull and glossy spray varnish
• White primer (spray)
• Flock
• Large round gypsum bases for showcasing
• Transparent plastic cylinder (to use as a dustcover)

I used sculpting tools when I filled in the holes of the slottabase.

Here you can see the different kinds of paints that I use. I don't use all the same paints because some colours are better from GW than from Vallejo, and other Vallejo's are better than the GW ones.

Painting the main colours

The following picture shows the primary colours I used. I chose to use black, white, golden, grey and red because the ancient Romans wore those colours. I used violet to be true to the army scheme. The faces are painted distinctly, since these miniatures would be used for wargaming, and so they needed to be recognizable on the battlefield.

In the picture above, you can see the main and basic colours of the miniature. The ropes and the manuscript have been blacklined (with black paint) to give contrast. Before painting with gold paint, I usually paint the surface with yellow, orange or Bronzed Flesh - mainly because metallic (and especially gold) colors don't cover very well otherwise.

The figures were painted Burnt Siena (a darker version of natural siena) and washed with Brown Ink. The staffs were painted with Chaos Black. The base was painted with Verde Pino (pinegreen).

In summary: Removing flash, assembly, priming, and painting the main colors are now complete. Removing flash is boring, but the time can be used to think of the colours to used on the the miniatures if you haven't decided it yet. Assembly was very slow, because I had to fill some holes with putty, and the putty took more than 10 minutes to dry. Elapsed Time So Far: 1 hour, 20 minutes per figure.

Next Time: Shading!