As promised (a couple YEARS ago), this is the article on
painting piping and lace in 15mm. For
this posting, I’m using the British Foot Guards from the peninsular
campaign. The figures pictured are from
AB, a brand that I am slowly beginning to embrace as much as Old Glory 15s.
The pictures in this entry assume that one had already
primed the figure with some sort of figure primer or paint. Here we have a black undercoat being used,
and the very first step I usually take is to paint the faces and hands with
shade and highlight colors. This is because
as Ian Marsh wrote, it “gives personality” to the figures.
After painting the flesh areas, I proceed to shade the areas
of the piping color. In this case, the
battalion in question is the British Foot Guards from the Peninsula, so I pick
a reasonable shade color for white, which is the piping and lace color. Any sort of gray will do. Here, I’ve used Vallejo #821, German
Camouflage Beige (picture #1). The areas
shaded do not include the fine piping or lace that should be painted, only the
larger areas of the same color.
The next step is to paint the piping and lace colors – in
this case, white. The key is to paint the areas of piping and/or lace that
would be smaller than other colors on the figure. So, the idea is to paint the piping color (in
this case white) in a way that is careful, but not necessarily too tight
because any white that is overplayed can be covered up by shade colors of the
areas in question. Since most of the
shade areas are red, and painting a maroon color over white leaves a weird sort
of bright maroon color, which just doesn’t look right, I outline the white
lace/piping colors with an opaque black (picture 2).
The whole secret to painting sharp piping and/or lace on a
15mm figure is to have a brush with an exceptionally well defined point to it.
Then use that point with shade color (this example uses the black undercoat
color) to make the narrow lines that give the detail. For example, the piping
at the bottome of the figure’s coat looks like an impossibly small line – which
it almost is. What I did was paint the line, using the point of the brush to
follow the contour of the coat, then use the point of the brush above and below
the line with black to give it the extra fine quality to it. The finished
figure is in the battalion of Foot Guards, shown below.
Here's a closeup of a company of similar figures, finished and based.
