Painting the guard, step two.

 

In the last step of painting I had coated all of my guardsmen with a dark greenish brown, then let them dry for a few days.

Let me comment a bit on the color wheel.  My initial coat was somewhere around 75 - 90, right?  A greenish-brown sort-of tone.  For the next coat I'd like to deepen things a bit, get some warm tones in there as well.  I know that there will be a leather-look to all their pouches and bandannas and what-have-you.  So I thought it would be a good idea to "cross the circle" a bit and add some crimson tones in there.   This is probably more appropriate for humans, we tend to have a red interior.  As if a cue ball on a pool table bouncing off a rail, we find Mid Blue (240), by doing this we form a triangle around the wheel.  I guess I'm sort-of planning to add some blue to the armor of these fellows, wherein they'll look appropriate if I do an allied force with my Marines Errant.


 I rinsed out my color cup (but not really well, I left plenty of paint in there from the first coat) and then moved on to some new paint.  I threw a dab of that same brown in there as a toning-down agent and then grabbed an old favorite of mine: Alizarin Crimson.  Here I have a photo of it on my bench, with the Burnt Umber and the Gloss Gel all in a water bath.

Green wash left in the cup from the last step.

Note the smaller brush.  This one is a small flat from a set Ethmongul purchased for me at Michael's craft stores.  I mention the brushes I use because you don't really need to spend a ton of money on fancy brushes.  They should be disposable tools at these early stages, because you're gonna use them, abuse them, then throw them out eventually anyway.

 

Here's what I'm doing.  I'm taking the smallish brush and going over the whole figure with the brownish-red tone, mostly brown.  Then I come back with a little bit of gloss and the crimson and add more to any exposed skin areas.  I'm mixing the paint on-the-fly in the center of the dish. When the wash separates on the green, I add a dab of the gloss to re-solidify the binder. 

I'll get all of these guys done and post the results soon.  There's a lot of them.  I'm starting to notice all these modeling mistakes.  Found a guy with two left-hands.