Back To Basics

I had expected to finish these lads today but I had over estimated my current endurance and under estimated the number of duty interruptions. Still, I made some significant progress, including suddenly realizing how rusty I was at various things and getting frustrated with the state of my motley paint collection, largely due to lack of local availability. 

I also managed to achieve my primary target for today: figuring out what 'swarthy' was going to look like on these figures and how to achieve that in an easily recreated manner. 

Not done yet, but starting to come together and I'm getting a feel for what I want them to look like, and how they are going to fit in.

My first efforts this morning were a dismal failure. Several figures had roughly the right shade and I could live with the variety but most of them needed touch ups and I just, could not, replicate it. Didn't help that  I had been playing about yesterday with various mixes, adlibbing and adjusting as I went and trusting to memory to recall which 3 or 4 colours were used in what proportions....AIGHHHNNN not anymore!  and anyway, I still wasn't really sure what I wanted. 

But, after a break for lunch and some thinking about colours, what I do and don't want them to look like (greenish khaki being out!) and so on, I decided to keep it simple and choose a base colour, straight out of the bottle, and a heavy wash to shade it and modify the colour slightly. It didn't take too many trials to decided on a Raw Sienna base with a wash of Burnt Umber. So that's settled.

However, I also decided that I'd had enough of my current motley collection of mostly cheap paints which had been the only option available within 75km since the local art supply shop closed down more than a decade ago. So, I broke down and ordered a set of 24 Artecho paints, largely in traditional colours (eg Raw Sienna, Phthalo Blue, etc etc). I don't know the company so whether or not the paints are any good remains to be seen, but I'll be surprised if they aren't as good as the better of my veteran paints and will be deeply disappointed if they aren't better then the bulk of the various cheap ones.