"The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black..."

Nothing like a bit of Joseph Conrad to brighten your day, I think.

So two nights of landscaping. A simple grey primer painted with acrylics 'borrowed' from school stock provided the base coat. Alas, whatever medium YPO are using in their acrylics drys in geological time so that was it for Monday night, leaving the state of affairs looking like this:



Tonight, I attacked the mud with good old drybrushing followed by a wash to bind it together. The was is still slightly wet here, hence the shine:



I went with an almost Martian palette for a couple of reasons: first, I'm thinking of doing something Martian with my remaining line infantry and secondly, for this one, I wanted a ruddy colour to allow the red coats to act almost as highlights.

I was going to go with something similar for the rock - almost an Ayers Rock orangey look - but decided at the last moment that I wanted something darker to act as a background to Barney. It's not, geologically speaking, totally kosher but I've got a dinosaur facing off against Victorian infantry so I think the good ship HMS Verisimilitude sailed some time ago.



The last job for the evening was the basic colour on the vegetation. I used the same colours as on Barney, just with no wash. As these are Tamiya they give a very matt, flat finish which works well on the broad leaves once they've been given a touch of gloss varnish at the end. A different highlight to the dinosaur colours will give enough variation whilst still keeping a certain unified colour scheme.



So the final score for tonight looks like this:




and with a couple of the chaps to see how the whole thing is pulling together:



So the last things to do are:

• Finish detailing the plants, roots and flowers especially
• Fasten in the troops and Barney and final blending of them into the base
• Final landscaping - some scatter, static grass and sand to add the final level of detail.

It looks like I'm on track to get this one finished for the weekend at which point I can start planning the next one.

Paint Table Sunday.

Paint table Sunday. It's a thing.

Just leave it, OK?

My wonderful other half kidnapped the children this morning so I got a chance to paint in daylight which is always handy when doing skin tones (I've got no odea where my daylight lamp went in the move).

I went with fairly dark skin, operating on the assumption that the chaps have been out in the noonday sun with the mad dogs for a while. As I mentioned in the comments, the faces are by far and away the best part of these sculpts, being even stronger on the plastics than on the metal officer.

So, basic shading (good old washes) and then highlights. A final shade where required. I got to practice some wet blending on the backof the uniform coats before I attempted the faces. Again, all done with a limited palette of a red, a white, a blue and a black  with Bone to mix in for highlights.


Quite happy with the faces but the brushwork is still a little sloppy in places so I'll have to do some touch ups here and there. The blending on a couple of the highlights is still too harsh but that was the first couple of ones I'd tried it on.

Here they in a suitably cinematic ratio atop the hill:


Annoyingly, there's a whopping great mold line I missed on the sergeant's arm that I only saw in hard sunlight.

And here that are a little closer so we can all the little imperfections.


No time tonight - must finish resources for tomorrow! - and unlikely to do anything on Monday; but moving on to landscaping and terrain this week with the target of having the whole thing wrapped up by the weekend ready for the next one.

I'd just like to say thank you to everyone who's viewed and commented so far - it makes it a lot easier to keep up the momentum.

The Dark Continent Takes Form

I played around with lots of different ideas for foliage to get that Lost World vibe. I was going to construct some palm trees with wire and fabric, a technique I'd had some success with in the past; but I decided that it was more important for me to get the first thing actually finished to get the mojo flowing. So, thanks to Dave (@thefrugalgamer) who reminded me of aquarium plants, I popped onto the Bay of E and awaited delivery. A bit of chopping and sticking has started to give me a pretty good bit of visual interest to frame the figures on the ridge: And with the valiant chaps of the Prince of Wales Own Volunteers in place, facing the monstrous spawn of the Dark Continent: So tomorrow it's time to dip the brush into the wet stuff. I'm intending to start easy by working on Barney do I can get back into the swing of blending. My plan is to do the whole thing with a rather muted, realistic palette to really make the redcoats pop. Of course, I might ditch that and go for one of the more garish recent suggestions for what a tyrannosaur might have looked like...