Happy Birthday USMC

 

My Dad's (1938-2015) second birthday: Served 1956-1965

Painting the Modelu HO Scale Transitional Era Crew Bundle - Part 8 Finishing Up

Time to wrap this up. These are relatively simple figures from a painting perspective. After the overalls, jackets and caps its just down to gloves, boots and touching up the skin a bit.

To start off I wanted to try something to try and bring out the features on the skin a bit more. I took some Army Painter Strong Tone and thinned it down about 50:50 with their glazing thinner. I painted all of the skin and the shirt with this mix and let it dry. It feels like it added quite a bit of depth to the face and filled in the eyes better than my initial effort, however, my highest highlight was really emphasized and looked very odd at this point. Didn't work as I had hoped on the shirt though, I think the detail is just to fine there to really take advantage of this technique. It also dried pretty glossy, but I expected that.

I went in with my mid-tone skin color. Ammo's Burnt Sand (A.MIG-0133), touched up the skin a bit which covered most of the gloss and tightened up the transition to that highest highlight.

From there I moved on to the gloves and boots, following pretty much the same process as the jackets and overalls; a dark, a mid-tone and a highlight. These areas are small and don't need those transitional 50:50 mixes that I used on the larger areas. I went with brown for the boots and dark grey for the gloves. I'm not quite sure what would have been a common color for railroad workers' gloves in the 50's so I went neutral.

Next its time to add some "nature" (a phrase we use when our Great Pyr brings in an assortment of leaves and twigs on her coat into the house). For me these will be diesel crews for warehouse row served by the Rio Grande. On to the dirt. I used two colors from my Pan Pastel stash, one dark and one light.

Since it is powder I might continue to play around with this, but for now I’ll call them done.

Painting the Modelu HO Scale Transitional Era Crew Bundle - Part 7 The Blues - Jackets

Now its time to lighten up the jackets. I'm using some colors that I was trying to avoid because they are part of Reaper's HD series which is not out of production. However, they look like they are going to work pretty well so I'll work with them now and then figure out some replacements.

The first color up is Solid Blue (29816). Its dark enough that I didn't bother to mix it with the Nightmare Black (9280). Its a good step up without needing an intermediate layer of the two colors mixed together.

I followed that up with Solid Blue mixed 50:50 with Nightsky Blue (29818). Trying to limit it to the higher areas now, leaving the two deeper blues in the folds creases.

Next up is then just a layer of Nightsky Blue. I failed to mention that I have been thinning all of these colors with water (since I'm not doing a wash or a glaze at this point). I just want the paint to flow off the brush and if it takes a couple of passes to get the color intensity I want that's just fine.

Final color is Winter Blue (29817). Again with the colors so close I skipped the intermediate mix and went straight from Nighsky Blue to Winter Blue for the final highlight. And of course that ended up being to big a transition so I glazed it back a bit and did a 50:50 mix then followed it up with Winter blue.

I think the jackets are looking pretty good. I like the contrast between the dark blue of the jacket and the more faded blue of the overalls.

Painting the Modelu HO Scale Transitional Era Crew Bundle - Part 6 The Blues - Jackets

For some reason I thought the jacket colors might be different but it seems like the only color photos I find have everything in blue denim. So more blue. the tricky part here becomes the need establish and maintain a blue jacket that is going to be a different blue from the overalls and cap.

To start things I off I went with Reaper's Nightmare Black (9280) which really seems to be very deep, dark blue. Now I need to tone it down with a different selection of blues than I used for the overalls and I think I want to lean towards a darker end result, the overalls ended up being a bit more "faded" than I was anticipating. Sometimes this is just a learn as you go process.

Its pretty dark but I like the contrast

Cartoon Wednesday