Dead Leaf Liberals

    PROBABLY THE MOST frustrating part of my interaction with wargaming hobby stuff is how slow I am at painting. I take a bit longer getting miniatures cleaned up, removing flash, mould lines, &c., but it’s painting where most of my ideas go to die an incredibly long death. I don’t dislike painting—I swear I don’t—but I’ve grown to resent it because of just how impossible it is for me to get anything up to my tabletop standards in a timely manner. (“Timely” in most cases would be “at all,” to be fair.) This is compounded by me not getting along with contrast paints (or speedpaints, either one) outside of thinning them down and using them as a wash.

    A line of Warlord Games Epic Battles Revolution line infantry painted hastily. They wear yellow-orange coats, white shirts and vests, white breeches, and feature a light green trim. The base color, which shows through as the shadow throughout the miniature but also appears as a substitute for brown, is a deep sea blue or dark teal. The tricorns, gaiters, and footwear, which would normally be black, is only highlighted in light blue instead.

    I also realized that, in my attempts at painting up my Epic Battles Napoleonics and mid-19th Century 3mm, I get bored easily with hewing to the traditional realistic style of miniature painting. This is hardly a break—hardly at all!—from that almost universal standard, but I wanted to play around with trying something a bit different. Thus, most of the little details are left in the background teal (Vallejo’s Dark Sea Blue over a light grey base). Colors are simple and flat, no shadows or highlights if I can help it. I tried to pick colors that weren’t technically appropriate but also not wholly inappropriate for the subject of the miniature—for example, I tried Dark Prussian Blue for the background due to Prussian Blue being invented during the Enlightenment. (I might still do the opposing force to this one in Prussian Blue.) I opted for a palette reminiscent of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec—it was that or Cezanne—because I felt like the palette best represented the same thematic shift I was trying to achieve with this slightly unorthodox style. (If a big part of this experiment was going to be doing all this painting faster than normal, I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater! So, a little bit of realism! Just a bit!) This also led me to the orange-yellow-brown color of the coats, which is supposed to be somewhere in the extremely rough ballpark (remember, we’re absolving ourselves of realism!) of a historical dye color known as “dead leaf.” I think natural dyes are a fascinating and wanted to do something a little unusual that nodded in that direction.

    In this quick painting style, a line of infantry can be tabletop ready within a couple hours, not a full day (or week). So, hopefully the revolution can catch fire and I can whip up another 7-9 lines of these lil liberal revolutionaries for my imagi-nation just as fast. (Fingers crossed!)