Wednesday, May 7, 2014

MFCA 2014 - Off to Valley Forge!


It's that time of year again!  Tomorrow I head south towards Philadelphia and Valley Forge for the 2014 MFCA show. This annual event is the premier miniature figure show in the country in my opinion and artists from all over the world attend and show their brilliant work. I always look forward to seeing so many of my old and new friends and meeting new artists who come for the first time. Something wonderful can always be found in the vendor area, from bases to books, militaria to figures and flats.

This year I will be posting photos each day from the show on my Facebook Wall and once home on Sunday I will post some of the best here on my blog. I hope to see many of you there so stay tuned to see what surprises this year's event brings.

Sunday, May 4, 2014

The Battle of Strasbourg - Update #1

Although these pictures are a few months old I wanted to post an update on the SBS for this vignette I have been working on. If you saw my first post you will remember that this will be a two figure vignette, one on foot and one mounted. Progress has been slow but this where we stand at the moment.





I began by painting the horse a basic mix of Mars Black and Burnt Umber. The armor was given an initial wash of Burnt Umber followed by a second wash of Burnt Umber with a bit of Mars Black added. The groundwork was given initial washes of Burnt Umber and Greenish Umber.


All of the leather was then painted with a mixture of Mars Brown and a touch of Yellow Ochre. The armor was lightly washed with Mars Black to further bring out the detail of the various plates.




The next step was to apply a thin wash of Burnt Umber to all of the leather. This ages the leather, tones down the bright base color and begins to pop out the stitching details. I have also applied some brown glazes to the horse to "warm" the tone a bit.





All of this work is designed to give a broad feel to the look of the horse and his armor. details will now begin to picked out and cleaned up. The armor plates will be NMM on these figures. A lot of my time has been taken up recently with experimentation using acrylics. This piece will be a mixture of both oils and acrylics as I try to hone some of my skills with the new medium. Cloth will be acrylic but the flesh and armor will all be oils. I have attached the rider's legs to the horse and my next post will show progress on him and the foot figure.