Friday, June 20, 2014

Finally working on Curt's figures

Or how to really procrastinate and then take the long and tortuous route to complete a simple task.

As you may or may not recall, I'm beginning to become hazy on the details myself, I was supposed to do some Cross of Iron themed figures for Curt as my entry. I'll ignore the shame I feel at not only not doing them during the competition, but also taking essentially three months off.

As usual I had a vague plan but I have dragged my feet at every step. I bought four Artizan late war Germans from FRP Games. I sculpted a mustache on one to make him look more like Schnurrbart and then I decided I would use the paints and techniques from the Reaper “Learn to Paint” Skin tone set.


So that was done while watching Spain vs. Chile, I'm not 100% happy with the results. I think I put too much highlight and covered the midtone. I may give it a glaze or a wash we'll see.



What I spent (wasted) most of my time today doing was looking up paint and conversion charts for craft paint to vallejo  (or is it the other way around?)

With the Farnsworth guide (here) as my source, this is what I found:

The chart at Nordalia, while not wholly inclusive, is pretty good. When I made my list though I had a little difficulty finding the colors I wanted as they were spread across “brands”. As it turns out Apple Barrel, Delta Ceramcoat, and Folk Art are all made by Plaid. Americana is made by Deco Art.

As I was writing this it also occurred to me that I could use a color picker to look at the computer colors used to represent the paint colors in the manufacturers published literature. I added ColorZilla to my Chrome browser and downloaded colorcop for reading colors from the pdf catalogs. I also looked into a color mixing program which I downloaded as a zip file as well (Different Color Software). My idea is that looking at the color codes for these various things will help get me in the ball park.

This post is getting long and rambling, so I'll wrap it up for now and give you some updates as I progress. Yesterday I bought most of the colors I needed for the Germans, so I will press on with that.

10 comments:

  1. Were you not 100% happy with the results of the flesh tones or of the Spain vs Chile game - it's not clear :-) ? For what it's worth, I think your painting looks fine.

    I'm always interested in colour equivalences, especially when I use Vallejo to replace my craft paints as each bottle is finished, so thanks for the data you've posted so far!

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    1. Thanks Hugh. That's what I get for writing these piecemeal. I'm sure it seemed clear at the time. It's the highlighting on the faces. I'm more upset with Italy not having the decency to beat Costa Rica, thus giving England a mathematical chance.

      I'll keep working on the paint equivalency. I'm running into a few issues of color availability at stores and some that may be discontinued shades.

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  2. Germans look pretty good to me Sean!

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  3. Nice moustache! I have the minis, and never thought of the moustache. Suddenly the soldier is more characterful, like saying: "careful, razor-blade is here! Flee for your life!"

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    1. Thanks Cedric, I hope I can do him justice. I wanted to do the mustache because I figured he would be a character who was over looked.I expected everyone to do Steiner or Stransky.

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  4. As for the figures they look really good to me.
    I'm looking forward to seeing more of them.

    Cheers
    Stefan

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    1. Thank you Monty, very high praise. I hope to have more done soon.

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  5. Fabulous start as far as I'm concerned, as for the line, "while watching Spain vs. Chile, I'm not 100% happy with the results", I don't suppose Spain was either! Then again, the less said about my beloved England the better!

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    1. Thanks Michael, I don't feel too bad for Spain they've had it good for a long time. I don't know who i feel worse for, England or Rooney's son. I saw some of the tabloid pages with pictures of his son bawling.

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