The Painting Guide Page 5

Gandalf the Grey! I hadn’t painted any plastic figures until very recently. I bought a Games Workshop battle set of the Mines of Moria in a closing down sale at our local toy shop, with the intention of putting it away for a year or two until my boys might show some interest in playing a game. The mistake I made was opening the box, just to have a peak inside. Later that day I was painting the Cave Troll and Gandalf soon followed! The plastic figures paint up very well, but the cleaning up process is just as important, if not more so, to give the paint a good surface to adhere to.
Below, a group of Highland bowmen from my 12th century Scots army. Gripping Beast figures, with plenty of cover!

a) FLESHY BITS: I always start painting a figure with its fleshy bits, working in this order:

EYES: paint a white blob into the eye socket. This does not have to be accurate as the black undercoating method means that you can black paint the eye socket back down again to where it should be. I tip the figure upside down and put a small blob of black paint into the eye socket for the eyeball. Try to make your blob circular, but with flat top and bottom. This suggests that the eyelids are covering part of the eye and stops your figure having that ‘wild staring’ look (unless you want your figure to have that ‘wild staring’ look of course!). Once the eye ball is in, I paint around the eye with black again to get rid of any bits of white that have gone where they shouldn’t. If your black paint covers up more of the white than you intended, don’t worry. You can either have another go, or leave it, as your figure will probably look as though he is squinting a bit which is perfectly acceptable.

FACE: I use a dark brown or marsh brown to block-in the main areas of the face. This can just be done roughly on the nose, forehead, cheeks and chin. Try to leave a line of black around the face and down the sides of the nose, but you can always put this back in again later if necessary. Onto the brown put a little bit of watery flesh. Don’t cover all the brown. By doing this you get a gradual shading of the face from flesh into brown and then into the black undercoat. If you want to add a light flesh highlight, dab a tiny bit onto the bridge of the nose and maybe the chin, but don’t overdo this.

LIPS: Mix a little flesh colour with some kind of red. I just pick reds randomly out of my box to give variety. The mixed colour should be redder than your flesh colour, a bit ‘lipsticky’, and dab it onto the bottom lip only. Use your black to paint round the bottom lip and paint the lip down to the shape you want.
HAIR: Before I paint any hair on the figure I usually do a bit of tidying up by painting black round the beard/moustache in case any of the flesh colours have wandered too close to the hairy bits. I use my horse colours for hair, dry brushing across the rises in the casting, so that the paint only touches the tops and the folds are left black. This gives the hair a deeper look and makes it stand out more from the face.
HANDS: Like the face, I block in the hand and fingers with brown or marsh brown. A little flesh colour goes on next creating the same shaded look as the face. To finish off the hands I paint black again between the fingers and run a line of black around the join between the wrist and the cuff of the shirt/jacket or whatever.