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

Painting the Trenchworx WWI Rolls-Royce Armored Car - Return of Camo

I continue to move along as quickly as possible. This evening I worked up all the basic camo. The base is still Middlestone, but this time the lighter color is Palamino Gold from the Reaper Master Series, and the dark tone is Vallejo Model Color German Black and Vallejo Model Air Green (at the moment I have forgotten which one).

Over the weekend I'll need to apply a filter, a semi-gloss finish, lining, rust, mud and dust. No problem!

I'm happier with the pattern and I'm happier with the colors. So far so good.

Tonight's work:

Palamino Gold over Middlestone

Adding in my German Black plus some Green (fortunately its still on the desk I'll remember to write it down)

Out lining the camo with the same black/green

Painting the Trenchworx WWI Rolls-Royce Armored Car - Stripping and Recovery

Since time has now become a big factor I'm pushing through some of this steps as quickly as I can. I finished stripping the Rolls this afternoon. I dried it off, let it air dry for a bit and went straight to priming. I used Vallejo primer through my airbrush and laid in a nice smooth coat quite quickly. I let that dry and then applied a basecoat of Vallejo Model Color Middlestone. I stopped here and I'll let this dry overnight before I start working on the camouflage pattern. I did sit down with some paints and make sure that the colors I was thinking about are going to work together. I should be ready to go to work on the camo pattern tomorrow. I'm going to skip trying to lay the base pattern in with the airbrush and just go straight in with the brush, the filberts are ready!

This is where I stopped with the stripping yesterday. I finished the process today. I hate stripping but there isn't time to just get another one and deal with this one later.

Here we go with the light grey primer

And then with I applied the middlestone basecoat.

Painting the Trenchworx WWI Rolls-Royce Armored Car - Disaster

It was not a good night for the Rolls. I finished dusting the model and started in applying the mud. I thought I knew what I was doing but the result was awful with no way to simply removed it from the model. Rather than dwell on it I just starting stripping it back to the resin. Quite painful since this is a competition pieces with the competition closing in fast. On the other hand it will let me go back and redo some things I wasn't happy with. I also figure that since I have done all the steps before that I can get it back to a finished state much faster. I don't need to do any experimenting on the palette or a piece of paper to get it right.

Mine does not look like this one, especially after I started to strip paint off of it.

This one is from the Trenchworx website. This is what I need to get back to.