|
|||||||||
|
German SS in greatcoat scale: 1/35 sculpted by: Vince Wai
I haven't sculpted or painted a 1/35 scale WWII German figure for at least 20 years. The last one was an Afrikakorp which was lost a long time ago. Thought it seems to me at first that it's more an easy task to sculpt figures in this scale, I find it's actually more challenging in creating the details as when I started to work on the project. This article is a photo essay recording how I painted this figure.
Preparations and tools
I'm mainly an acrylic painter and have little use with oil paint. Usually I would mix my own colours and store them in small jars (fig.1). Often, I would prepare the colour in a way that it will consist of a base colour, a darker shade and a lighter shade and of the colour and store them in adjacent jars. The reason why I premix the colours is because I can have more control and exact colour during the time of each painting project (which takes as long as a week or even a month). Sometimes I would add some gouache into the acrylic colour and this helps to give a matt appearance and better covering property. For the brush, I use Vallejo brushes and they seem to be fine to me. The most used brushes in this project are the 3'0' and 4'0' (fig.2). I bought the set of brushes two years ago and they're still in very good condition. Finally, with my age(44 now :-(((...), my eye-sight isn't as good as it used to be anymore. There's no way that I can paint figures in this scale without the help of a 5X magnifying glass and an optivisor (fig.3). I use the optivisor for painting the faces and the magnifying glass for painting the rest of the figure.
fig. 2 fig.3
Painting
I usually start with the head as this helps to give the feeling of giving life to the figure. Also, a nicely painted head would give myself greater incentive to finish the rest of the figure. I don't prime my figures, but what I do is give the figure's face (or the rest of the figure) several coats of the basic flesh colour and the uniform and other parts with their respective base colour. After the several coatings have dried, I will start some serious painting. As I've mentioned above, I mixed my own flesh colour shades with different ratios of white, yellow orche, burnt sienna and a little bit of red. For flesh shadow colour, I would add in more burnt sienna and raw umber (and a little bit of black for the darkest areas) while more white and yellow orche is added for the highlight colour. Don't limit yourself with just the "flesh" mix and colour in painting the face, adding a bit of blue or green with the shadow mix will help give a more "richer" appearance. Basically I use glazing which means applying the diluted paint in a number of layers to create the transition. However, recently I've started trying the water base oil paint and mixed them with acrylic in painting faces, which allowed me to paint the face with a more wet-on-wet approach and drying time is not critical.
Helmet Cover
The helmet cover that I've painted is based on an "oak leaf" autumn pattern which I started to create with a base coat of greyish sand colour by mixing dark sand colour with considerable amounts of grey. Then patches of dark green and "red brown and orange" is added with spots of dark green and orange brown further added to break up the pattern. A good reference is "German Camouflage Uniforms 1937-1945" by Dr. Jean Borsarello.
|
|
|
