Transcript
You ever feel like you’ve gone backwards in a skill? Like lost proficiency rather than gained proficiency? Doesn’t make sense, right? Nevertheless, that’s the twilight zone feeling I’m experiencing right now. I think I’m doing speed painting wrong.
I had this whole three minute intro planned – and it was very funny and very clever, trust me, but my producer pulled the plug on it and said we have no time for that. Because we have like eighteen miniatures to paint. Oh boy.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we’re doing part three of our skirmish game mini-series! And where we thank our patrons for their generous support in this journey of hobby self-discovery. Muchas gracias.
Okay, eighteen miniatures are on the paint table, we got no time for procrastination – which is of course my favorite part of any project – so let’s sit in the damn chair and engage with brute force. There’s a video on that chair brute force thing right here.
One side note, I’ve changed my painting video setup once again. I bought a used Sony ZV-1 on Ebay and this is the first time I went shopping for an “inferior” camera. I specifically wanted to get a camera that had a chip smaller than full-frame or APS-C, and that was to help me with focus while working on miniatures. Like we briefly talked about in the smoke and minis video, the smaller the sensor, the deeper the depth of field, meaning more of the subject is in focus. I think this ended up being a good investment for these kinds of videos, based on the erratic way that I tend to hold miniatures and paint ‘em, but we’ll see.
So we’re gearing up to play the first solo scenario in the Silver Bayonet skirmish game. For this we need, in addition to the warband itself, which we “built” in this video – and uh that’s a lotta snapping today – we need a minimum of eight wolves and a couple of werewolves.
The wolves I knew were gonna be truly speed painted with Contrast paints, no sweat. And I think I ended up knocking these guys out in a single day. I used various browns and blacks from the Contrast line and just sorta mixed and matched colors on the figures to give them some color texture. I ordered the models from two different sellers on Etsy and the set of three I got from this store are ridiculously large. They’re like Princess Mononoke size. This is probably an unfair advantage to me, the player, in the skirmish game scenario because these wolves are so big it’ll be hard for them to take advantage of cover during a game. And they look kinda silly – or dramatic I suppose – next to a human-sized figure. I guess they’re dire wolves, right? Right.
The only bit of detail I actually took a little time to paint were the jaws, and teeth, and the claws. And only two of them had eyes worth bothering to paint. After the initial coats of Contrast paint I felt like I wanted a bit more value contrast in the highlights on the fur, so I dry brushed some lighter tans and grays over the fur and then hit that with another quick wash to smooth them back out.
Some green tones for the bases to add some color contrast to the overall finished models and the wolves were good to go.
Next up were the werewolves. I had this one all ready to go, waiting in the Primed and Ready display case. In the interest of speed painting, I stayed on the Contrast train with a Darkoath and Cygor Brown mix for the skin tone and I put some thinned down black on the palette too so I could blend in some darker colors on the hands and feet. This guy has a supercool pose, right, it’s a 3d print from Etsy as well and I’m pretty sure it’s still available from a lot of stores.
I’m not sure why I went with some standard paint for the cloth, but I did. I went with a blue to sit nicely against the warm browns of the fur and flesh. I blocked in all the leather bits with this dark brown and then, a big part of painting with Contrast paints is prepping messy areas with a light gray or white and I typically do this stage quite a bit on all the minis I paint. Then I prepped all the bits that would become metallic with Black Templar Contrast. I used Space Wolves Gray instead of the leather color for some of these wrappings cause it’s got a blue tint to it that compliments the cloth color.
Next up, time to weather the leather. Again, this is a pretty typical process I use, couple of lighter leather colors and then all that gets a quick wash with some Army Painter Soft tone. We gotta highlight the blue cloth, of course, and I didn’t spend too much time on this. I finally picked up some of the new formula Citadel blue wash and doused the cloth in it.
Drybrushing up some highlights on the fur is pretty standard too, just like on the wolves, and then some dark tone wash to soften those highlights back down. Another standard process I use for metallics always starts with this Scale 75 Black Metal and I hit the few metallic bits that there were on the model.
The base again I went for some greenish tones to contrast with the figure itself and this was just the typical slosh some paint down, dry brush, and then wash process. I tried to mottle the colors up a bit by slapping down different colors of paint and wash randomly and that’s it, stick a fork in this guy. Cause you know, he’s done.
This second werewolf is from Privateer Press and he’s a pretty cool sculpt, so I kinda feel bad for just doing a speed painting job on it, I feel like this could have been a pretty epic looking figure if I’d taken some time to paint him up, but hey, there’s no looking back now. I went with a lighter skin tone Contrast paint for this guy just to vary it up a bit, and then I mixed up a medium gray Contrast color to douse his fur in. A lot of times I have trouble determining what a miniature is actually wearing, like this guy presumably has some fur but this looks like he’s wearing a cloak made out of his buddy’s skin or something, like the cloak has all this fur and braided hair, but it looks like it’s the actual mini’s fur and hair? I don’t know, we’re just slapping paint down at this point.
This guy’s entire lower half is just covered in armor, so black Contrast goes everywhere in prep for the metallics. I wanted a darker leather than the standard Snakebite Leather color so added some of that Cygor Brown and painted up the hide cloak in that mix. Now this dude only has a couple bits of cloth and I went with red just to make something pop on him, but in the end I probably should have went with a blue or green, but again, we’re just rolling with it, we got no time for fixing bad calls. He’s covered in these bone spur teeth details so I did a quick bone color pass on those, dropped on some wash and highlighted them back up with quick touches of a brighter bone color. Then I did the metallics and just tried to move relatively quickly, adding some edge highlighting more than anything else and letting most of the armor go dark. I spent a little extra time making the face armor pop a bit and just adding dots of bright metallic to certain areas.
Slapping some washes down on the base, again going towards some greenish tones, and we keep on keeping on.
Now before I start on the warband, I have these things I picked up to use as Clue or objective tokens in the game. I went with these and a 3/4” hole punch rather than buying specific tokens – of which there are plenty of very cool ones out there – but I liked the idea of being able to swap out the paper circle at any time. So I can make custom tokens like for treasure or whatever a specific skirmish game might require whenever I need to. These came in raw wood so I thought I’d use some acrylic ink to quickly stain them a bit darker, just for aesthetics on the table. I did wonder if using a water-based ink would cause these to warp, but you know me, I gotta try it to find out. And the answer is … yes, yes it does warp the wood. So this guy right here has two coats of ink and apparently double the ink means double the warpage. I was a little horrified at first but then tried putting the acrylic dome in just to see what it was like and the warping actually proved to be a bonus feature! See, the acrylic domes fit so snugly into the discs that normally you can’t get them back out. That’s why I drilled holes in the centers of these discs, so I could poke the dome back out, with a drill bit or a piece of brass wire or something. But now with the warping, the domes are just loose, which is actually perfect! And even though it’s all bent, the thing looks fine on the tabletop. Typically games will call for five or so objective tokens, so I’m staining up five of these for now.
All right, now we’re finally onto the warband. And the first thing I decided was that I needed to paint up one mini with the previously chosen French Napoleonic colors to kinda set the standard and figure out the colors on an actual model. Now, for the sake of time and the actual logistic issue I ran into with producing this video, which was that I didn’t have all the minis on hand for the warband at the time of shooting, I’m only going to show this first mini get it’s paint job. Also it’d probably be boring to go through all these steps on all the other figures. But we’ll take a look at all the finished miniatures of the warband at the end.
So I primed the warband figures with a brown undercoat before putting the white ink zenithal on top. I figured a warmer shadow tone would be a good contrast to the blues and whites these figures are gonna wear. So I started this guy with putting a pale gray down on his white uniform parts. And then I did a little highlighting up with some white on those same bits. One thing that turned out kind of unexpected was when looking at the French army color scheme, they appear to wear mostly white, with their coats and hats being the dark blue and their boots in black. But almost all of the figures I chose for the warband are really buttoned up in their coats, so there’s actually not much white to be seen on these figures.
Anyway, time for the biggest color choice in the scheme. I generally like blue as a color and I really dig this Dark Prussian Blue and yes it’s ironic that I’m using an enemy army’s color for this French warband and yes, I think the blue should have been a few shades darker if I really wanted to match the French uniform blue, but I don’t care, I’m going with this singular color and there’s gonna be a lot of it! I put two coats down to make it solid and then went in with this Contrast paint mix for all the leather bits. Gloves, bags, belts, holsters, anything leather I hit what the same color, in the interest of speed painting.
Then I went in with the black Contrast to block out anything that was gonna be metallic. So another detail on most of these figures that isn’t really part of the warband are all these pieces of armor. Armor can be taken by soldiers in The Silver Bayonet game but I don’t have any in this particular warband that did so. But they’re on the mini, so we’re painting them up.
I used multiple coats of Skeleton Horde for anything wooden on the figure, like the vampire stakes, the torch and the vampire stake hammer handle.
And now for that spot of red I’ve been waiting to add, this is the third and final French uniform color and apparently they just used it on their collars and cuffs, so this guy’s collar works great for that. And his hat band. Some of the other figures have different bits that allowed me to put a little bit more red into onto them but not much. To be honest, a darker blue would have clashed less with these splashes of red but you know, oh well. I highlighted the red to make it pop a little bit more and then I moved on to shading the coat and hat.
Shading cloaks is one of the most difficult things for me, even though I love the shapes of cloaks. But I tried not to mess around too much and just be happy with something okay. I mixed some black into the Dark Prussian Blue to get the shadow color and used this brighter blue pretty well thinned out to glaze up the highlights. Now, I’m a terrible glazer so we’re just gonna move on. I probably should have done some wet blending and, well, I’m just sort of terrible at all kinds of blending, so it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Blending and glazing are definitely two techniques I want to like study and practice.
All right, on to the Black Metal. And I just put this down kinda sparingly at first and then on the bigger panels of armor I just base coated them in it. All followed by the ubiquitous Nuln Oil wash of course.
I slapped some various browns and greens onto the base while the wash dried and then I went back in with a brighter metallic to put in the edge highlights on the steel bits. I just wanted to put fairly contrasty highlights here and there and not mess with building up any gradients in the dark metal, both for time and punchiness. I know this is all gonna be dulled down after the final matte coat but I’ll go back in with this bright metal and touch it up after the fact.
Drybrushing the base always looks good and of course I always put a wash over the drybrushing. I don’t know why I always do that, but I do it very consistently. I like the smoothing effect it has on the drybrushing. Even though I often have to go back a second time with the dry brush to add just a touch more brightness. I told you, I do speed painting wrong.
The Abby Singer step is the torch! Blending with fresh Contrast paint is always a joy, so easy to work with. I used these five colors and put ‘em down in that order and then just went back and forth teasing out the blends and the fade to black at the end of the flames.
The martini step I decided would be the introduction of a little bit of dry pigment to weather the boots. To be honest, I should have also weathered the hem of the coat and probably the whole figure in general but I could do that later on if I feel like it. Which we both know I probably won’t.
Then, after another week of painting, I finished the rest of the warband, and there they are!
Ottilie Bastarache our fearless Officer.
Felice Armand, our enthusiastic vivandierie.
Gaspar Gagneaux, our mystic-curious doctor.
Claude Cellier, our talkative scout.
Vermont Escoffier, our artifact-hunting Supernatural Investigator.
Jolanda Scaletta, our Vatican agent Occultist.
Baptiste Moreaux, our surly brute of an Infantryman.
And Brielle Pelletier, our headstrong Grenadier.
Together they make up Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars, The Nightmare Hunters.
Ah, and here are the nightmares that shall be hunting them in the first scenario. Our wolves and our werewolves. Of course I’ll throw all these pics Instagram too.
All in all, not too bad. It was a task indeed to get these all done for one video. But I feel highly accomplished at this point and ready to dive into some actual gameplay. Now as far as producing a battle report style video, I have no idea how that’s gonna turn out, I’ve never done it before. But you know, we tackle things here on the channel because of the channel, which is to say, I’m motivated to get things done and try new things all because of you, dear viewers, and that, my friends, is priceless for me.
So go get your speed paint on! Paint up a warband! Sitting in a chair is easy, remember?
See ya!