writes:I sprayed them with Wal-Mart grey primer, which is the key reason I keep frequenting America's largest retailer, despite everything that I dislike about them. It's great and it's $0.94 USD a can. I use black for most figures, but for light- or bright-coloured models, grey is the way to go. (I'm not showing that in a photo. It's not hard to imagine.)
Next, I drybrushed everything that will eventually be white with a pale grey shade - the furry bits on Santa and Mrs Christmas, the Sugarplum Fairy's wings, the schoolgirl's blouses. My painting style involves a lot of drybrushing, with single-stroke painting for the most visible highlights. This is my nod to the Dallimore school, without taking anywhere near as long.
At this point, I block-painted in the colours. I decided to use a limited palette of Christmas-y shades; red, green, white and black, with some yellow for contrast. Some blue for the delinquent boy's denims.
Failing in my research (i.e. not going to the Amazon website to look), I had no idea how to paint 'Black Pete', but, deciding that he was the bringer of coal to bad children, I decided on a black-and-white scheme. These are the team colours of Newcastle United FC, Newcastle being famous as a coal port.
I used a wide mixture of paints, proving what a slacker I am. Other people have organised collections of numbered paints from a chosen range. Not me. The red is an Adiken colour, Gore Red for the base, with GW's Blood Red for the main tone and orange for the highlight. The green is Howard Hues Dragoon Green. The black and whites are just craft store paints.
(There would be a picture of this, but we had a winter storm, and I stayed indoors. Yeah, I suppose I can take photos indoors. But you've seen red bits painted red before, right?)
I painted the faces next. My favourite flesh tones are the Foundry three-colour bottles, but I long ago ran out of the base shade (the one you need most of), and Foundry don't make it easy to get a couple of bottles of that and the main shade without having to purchase a lot more stuff. So I mix a base shade of about 60-40 Native American and Suntan, both from Howard Hues. I block in all the 'flesh' areas. Then I paint the brow, nose, chin, ears and cheekbones with a lighter shade of this, by mixing in some of the Foundry flesh highlight paint (which I still have plenty of). Faces get a lot of attention, as these are what people look at.
Now it's time for the first round of fixing mistakes. It's far easier for me to paint fast and touch-up later than to paint super-carefully and get it perfect the first time. I accept that the price for this is that I am fairly convinced that I am a terrible painter for about 90% of the process. Then, to my amazement and pleasure, I suddenly improve!
