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Cadian Olive Drab uniform test scheme... need opinions, criticisms, improvements

Started by Stewie Griffin, November 01, 2012, 04:01:29 PM

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Stewie Griffin

Hi everyone,

Basically for a while now I've been planning on re-painting my Cadians to have another go at painting their uniforms, changing my colour scheme from the standard GW scheme to a more ww2 styled olive drab colour instead.

This is my first attempt at doing it - more specifically on the fatigues - for the flak armour I've kept my old method, because it's relatively quick and easy, though I may change that also (please also ignore the flesh - yes I know it looks klkn, I have done, and can do, flesh much better than that, what I did here was just a quick test to see if a new method of doing it worked well - evidently, it did not...).








The method I used for the fatigues (since that's mostly the bit I'm interested in at the moment, since they're the bits which are going to be the olive drab colour) is as follows:-

1) Base it with Death World Forest Green (which annoyingly takes 2 coats to go onto a black undercoat properly...)

2) Over that put a layer of Elysian green, leaving DWFG in the recesses

3) Wash everything with Athonian Camoshade wash ink to tone it all down

So yeah, what do we think of it? How does it look to you? Good? Bad? Ugly? Boring even? (with the green flak armour - though I myself don't mind it like that since the colours are different)

And more importantly - how can it be improved? - As I say, I'm looking for my fatigues to be a nice olive drab colour, similar to the uniforms worn in WW2 by the allies (since that's the best e.g. I can think of)  - meaning the green has to be a more natural colour, and quite subdued - it's not meant to stand out/look unnatural. While I think the above looks ok... I'm just not sure about the method I suppose - my last set of cadians looked fine, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and the method of layering one colour on another, especially when it comes to fatigues, can lead to endless irritations when the layer colour goes into the recesses by accident. So yeah, I'd appreciate advice on that front.

Further advice I'd like concerns the flak armour and skin...

Armour: Basically I want my armour to look like GWs - kind of a midtone green with some nice highlights. While I do like my current method and it's looks, I just think GWs looks better...  unfortunately GW have removed pretty much all their painting articles from what I can see on their website (because hey, they were no use to anyone right? >:( ) so I dunno how to do it... - best/closest look I can get to it is this guys here: http://www.40konline.com/index.php?topic=191868.0 (look for the post by a guy called straight silver) - But I'm concerned since they use colours which are similar to the olive drab recipe I use, that the armour and fatigues would look a little too similar - which isn't good for making a good looking model I think (since it'll look just one colour... good for real life camo, not good for minis) - though looking at the colour conversion chart it seems that only elysian green is common to both the armour and fatigues, so maybe it'd work - what do you think?

Skin: This one's more about speed - my previous skin method used Bestial (or calthan) brown as a base, layered with Dwarf flesh, highlighted with elf flesh. While the results are fine, it just takes too damn long with cadians... especially when you've got 50 odd of them to paint...for 500pts. So yeah, I was just wondering what is the fastest way of painting flesh to a decent standard/tabletop standard for your average infantry-man? I've got a feeling that the GW method in their painting guides (which again...are now gone - clap clap GW...) was something like tallarn flesh, washed with ogryn flesh, highlighted with tallarn possibly, but I honestly dunno...

Anyway - thanks for all your help, opinions and advice! Hope you can help me out here...

EDIT: Also a quick question with regards to officers... obviously they have to stand out from the masses of guardsmen, and I was going to use red to do this, since it complements green nicely. My question is this - for my officers should I give them a green and red uniform (red being on things like cuffs, caps, and other ceremonial stuff) OR should I go for the full blown standard cadian uniform as a kind of full on ceremonial dress uniform? Or perhaps should I do both, according to rank? (with the high ranking officers wearing the standard cadian scheme dress uniform, and the lower ranking officers wearing a more combat orientated olive drab and red uniform)

BloodiedFangs

Really quick couple of ideas: to get a better result on the armour, I'd seriously suggest a thin line highlight around some of the upper edges, using the basecoat plus a dab of bleached bone (thinned a bit, of course). For the camo's, a quick drybrush using a similar colour concept to the armour should help quite a bit. The idea at this scale is contrast. I actually generally prefer to basecoat, drybrush and then ink/wash in order to get a bit of a blend going on and help rein in how stark it can sometimes appear. I'd suggest a similar idea again for the skin, using either dwarf flesh or bronzed flesh. IMO if you need to do large quantities and achieve acceptable minis, this is by far the easiest

Tempest Six Two

Joebba- here's a link to an Abbadon I did for mate (still WIP in this pic) whose face was a simple Zandri Dust base, Agrax Earthshade (Devlan Mud) Wash and an Ushabti Bone (Bleached Bone) highlight.

http://tempests40kbunker.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/despoil-this-abbadon-gets-some-colour.html

Since these pics I gave the face a wash of Gryphonne Sepia, this warmed it right up, which might be more inline with the skin tone that you're after for Cadians..

The fatigues and armour colour combo is good, I love WW2- esque IG armies, its just that you also have to be able to get some form of highlighting in there so the minis 'pop' on the tabletop- its a balance between realism and exaggeration...       
My mini painting and terrain building blog- come check it out: http://tempest-terrain.blogspot.com/

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