What I've been working on

I've been in a bit of a painting slump recently. Any project gets 3/4ths done, and then something else takes my fancy.

So I have tried to impose some discipline on my painting, while still enjoying what I'm working on and finishing something. Repainting a kitchen, a front hall and assorted stuff does not count.

So here's what I've finished lately:

What do you mean I cannot mix periods like this?

1 French Musketeer from Regiment Languedoc for the Dutch Wars
1 Mexican Infantryman for the 1860s/1870s clashes with Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas and the US Army.
1 Mounted English Civil War Royalist cavalry senior officer - tentatively for Sir Humphrey Bennett's Regiment of Horse
9 Sassanid Clibinarii

They show off several new facets of my painting ability. When I paint 15mm figures, I glue cavalry to the horse and paint them as one unit. I'd originally done that with 25mm figures as well. However, it posed problems - especially when putting multiple figures on a single base. It was very difficult to maneuver a paint brush around to paint the figure, let alone spackle, paint, gravel, wash, dry brush and static glue the bases.

So now I mount cavalrymen on a nail in a wine cork glued to a soda cap, while I glue the horse to another soda cap. It makes things much easier to manipulate and get into the empty corners.

Only the two infantrymen were fresh paint jobs.

The 9 Clibinarii were the second part of 18 I purchased from Gripping Beast last year. I hated painting those figures. The horse and men had serious flash issues, to the point where I had to take a Dremel tool to them just to get the bows to fit in the hands of the figures. Gluing the bows in was also a pain. About halfway through, I decided I thoroughly hated how they were coming along and threw them in some Pine Sol to start over.

I started over. As my confidence has grown, I have begun to attempt more elaborate armor patterns, similar to those done by An Hour of Wolves and Shattered Shields. I have yet to do any quartering, but I have done single horizontal lines and double horizontal lines and vertical lines. I'm quite pleased with some of the color combinations:

Double white and green horizontal lines. Very colorful.

White and red horizontal lines. This one was very involved, but worth it.

Ignore the fuzzy Cavalier in the way; ooh and aah at the yellow and blue striped lamellar armor.

I took a different tack with these. Instead of just randomly using a color, the way I had with previous Sassanids, I took a "knight" approach and tried to give each figure a set of colors to tie them together.

All the unit needs is their flag. I have some interesting flag patterns from Shadows in the Desert, but those will be used on the general vignette. These may just get an A&A standard of ribbons on a pole.

The Cavalier was also a repaint of a figure I had first painted at 18/19. It was a good paint job for somebody starting out, but I can do MUCH better now. With a lot (40 Old Glory Cavalry, 6 boxes of Warlord Cavalry, 2 boxes of Dragoons and another four boxes of Infantry) more ECW figures in my possession that need painting and basing, it seemed far more effective to strip them down and rework. So into the Pine-Sol they went.

The officer is a test figure for how to paint buffcoats and blackened armor. When I'd originally painted the figure, I just painted the coat and leather equipment white, and the armor silver, then hit it with a Minwax stain. It worked, sorta. Now that I'm much better, I went with something different.

The armor was primed black, painted with Reaper's Blackened Steel, then hit with Vallejo's black ink wash. It gives me the very effect I was looking for - metallic, but dark. Fairly straight forward. The buffocat was actually painted using Reaper's Blond Hair triad. I wanted the coat to stand out from the leather boots and leather cross belts. I'd also read how variable buffcoat quality can be, and that the better quality coats are lighter. Since this fellow is a colonel at 1644 scale and a captain for Once Upon a Time in the West Country, it seemed logical to go lighter. I'm pleased with how it worked out.

Next up is a Sassanid general vignette:

Planned vignette - cavalry general exhorting the troops (A&A), standard bearer (A&A) and drummer (Gripping Beast)

Their horses

Then more Gripping Beast cavalry. The Light Cavalry is much better behaved, but I still have to deburr two standard bearer hands to put the Essex horsetail standards in them.