Painting the Trenchworx WWI Rolls-Royce Armored Car - Finishing Up

After spending a lot of time up close and personal with the Rolls today I'm going to call it done. I worked in more dust and mud effects and painted a couple of the elements that I have been ignoring to this point. Mainly the headlights, which I think are glowing quite nicely, and the machine gun in the turret. I had to re-establish a couple of my panel lines as well. Overall I'm quite please with the vehicle so it was time to work on the display base. I'm keeping the base quite simple as I don't want it to pull attention away from the model. I finished off the basic ground work and it just needs some grass to finish it off. Based on how the base looks like when its finished I may tweak the Rolls a bit.

So heading to the finished line on this one.

Working in a few more layers of mud and streaking both it and the dust down the sides. Concentrating mostly in the wheel wells at this point.

The Rolls gets some wheels! I'm calling this Bulletproof Ghost finished.

Working on the display base. The perspective is making the Rolls look really small on the base.

Painting the Trenchworx WWI Rolls-Royce Armored Car - Weathering

Yesterday evening I applied the first wash, working into panel lines and around protrusions. I let that dry overnight and sat to do more work tonight. I worked in some rust and then using the airbrush to apply an initial layer of dust across the upper surfaces. I have applied the first layer of pigment dust as well. I need to let things set a bit and work it into the surface a bit more. Then we will see how it looks and where I need to take it from there. So there are a fair number of pictures tonight from the different steps I have taken over the last few work sessions.

Dark brown wash using an enamel product from AK

Working in the rust. I used a water soluble oil paint, Burnt Umber in this case.

And the using Tamiya Buff I applied a light dust across the upper surfaces.

The first application of pigments. They need to dry before I can really see if I need to do more or strip them out.

Painting the Trenchworx WWI Rolls-Royce Armored Car - Filter and Sealer

Since I forgot to bring it with me over the weekend the Rolls is a bit behind where I hoped it would be at this point. I applied a filter to help pull all the colors together a bit more and this time I went in and applied a base of hull red to the leaf springs as a base for some rust work. I also did some chipping again, remember not all foam packing material is created equal! One bit of foam from a pack of miniatures was just to coarse but the foam from a pack of Freebooter miniatures was just right. After the chipping was done I applied the semi-gloss or satin finish. This will help protect the acrylic paint from the enamel paint that I'm going to apply in the next step. This finish enhances the capillary action of the washes. On a matte finish washes tend to spread wide instead of following along the seams. This finish needs a good 12 hours to dry, even in my climate so that was all I could do for the evening.

I think that I'm glad that I had to strip this one. I'm much happier with the overall look. Still going to skip the splattered mud effect though!

The tires with an initial coat of dust also received a spray of semi-gloss.

Shopping II - Painting on the Minis

My intention this weekend was to finish the Rolls Royce Armored Car. I gathered all my materials together and loaded everything up. Upon arrival, while I have everything I needed to work on the Rolls, I didn't actually bring the model with me. Fortunately I never go anywhere with out my minis at this point. I debated a bit and then decided I should start on the minis for the Shopping II diorama.
Early last week I found the vehicle I want to use and I spent sometime modifying that and getting it ready for painting. However, the minis have been primed and ready for paint for some time so I decided I would spend my weekend painting time on them.

I have shown some pictures of these five Hasslefree minis in some previous posts but there is where I got them to over the weekend.

First up the Sellers:

These two fine gentleman will be peddling their wares. All strictly legal of course. Looks like my lights washed out the skin tones a bit.

Followed by the Buyers:

They have a little hazardous duty pay to part with. I need to redo the eyes on the mini on the right. They got away from  me. I tried to fix them but I ended up putting a layer of skin of them and I'll go in and do them again.

I'm keeping the palette really simple on these and the minis are sharing a lot of the same colors. I'm trying to give the guys a bit of an ex-military look to them and so far I'm pretty happy with how they are coming out. So far so good, now if I could just figure out where I set my single painter entry I would be happy.

A "New" Skintone Receipe

As happens frequently on my blog I can go off on tangents when working on something else. I have been working with my ScaleColor paints from Scale 75. However, I have found that they can be frustrating to work with at times. The regular line is just a bit thicker than a lot of other paints out there (including Vallejo Model Color) and thinning them properly can be vexing. When I have sat and worked with them exclusively for a while I find things coming together much better and their Fantasy Colors are much thinner and easier to work with.

One of the things that I have learned from Scale 75 is how to get a better variance in the skintones themselves (okay I knew this but I didn't really know how to put it in to practice). When you buy a set there is a little card in there with a couple examples on how to use their colors to achieve different effects. While the Spanish to English translation is poor (at best) they are usually simple enough to piece together what they are trying to say. It doesn't help that frequently the instructions are written from the point of view of someone using an airbrush. Its just impractical to use an airbrush to paint the face on a 25/28mm mini.

I decided that I would like to try and replicate the tones in the instructions with Reaper paints. Reaper makes up the bulk of my paints and I use them more frequently than any of the paints that I own. To match colors I went through an exercise that I have done before. On one sheet of paper I drew half inch squares with some space in between them. On another sheet I drew a much larger square and I cut the center out. The center being a 1/2"x1/2" square. The outer edges of these squares were painted with the flesh colors from Reaper and Scale75. I painted the different colors (and labeled them) on the 1/2" grid as well. With the center cut out I can slide the square with the color I'm trying to match with my smaller swatches of color. You can see a detailed example of this process in my post from June 9. 2014:Color Matching Brand to Brand

From this exercise I can see that Scale75's SC-22 Arabic Shadow is almost a dead ringer for 9220 Olive Shadow from Reaper. Using this method I was able to pick out 8 Reaper paints that are a pretty good match to the Scale75 Flesh set.

Here is the list:
SC-17 Pale Flesh  - 9048 Fair Highlight
SC-18 Light Skin  - 9234 Bright Skin Highlight
SC-19 Golden Skin - 9233 Bright Skin
SC-20 Basic Skin - 9044 Tanned Skin or 29822 Suntan Flesh
SC-21 Pink Flesh - 9140 Blushing Rose (I'll  have to find another equivelent for this if I run out of Blushing Rose, its a color that has been discontinued by Reaper).
SC-22 Arabic Shadow - 9220 Olive Shadow
SC-23 Indian Shadow - 29801 Crimson Red
SC-24 African Shadow - 9025 Burgandy Wine (probably with a drop of 9164 Dark Elf Skin to grey it down a bit)

I would then use these colors like this:
Base coat 1:1 Blushing Rose and Tanned Skin OR Suntan Flesh
Apply an overall highlight of 1:1 Tanned Skin OR Suntan Flesh and Bright Skin
Apply a shadow (working from underneath) of 1:1 Crimson Red and Blushing Rose
Apply a highlight of Bright Skin Highlight
Outline the eyes and the upper lip with 1:1 Crimson Red & Burgandy Wine
Apply a glaze to the cheeks of 1:1 Blushing Red and Crimson Red
Final highlight with 1:1 Bright Skin Highlight and Fair Highlight

The charts and some examples:

Color Swatches with product numbers and names. Don't forget this step!

You can see and maybe even be able to read some of my notes on the right

That's the Scalecolor colors on the top, everything else are Reaper Triads

Ultimately I will cut these out so I identified them on the back rather than the front.

The base coat of Blushing Rose + Tanned Skin

Here he is pretty much complete, probably still needs a few touchups