Painting Blackbeard
Most painting articles are tutorials, so I thought I'd do a "lessons learned" instead.
It was my Dad's 80th birthday earlier this year, so I was racking my brain for something to get him. Eventually I decided to paint a figure for him. He's fairly interested in the Golden Age of Piracy and the Caribbean in general, so I looked around for a suitable figure. I settled on Andrea Miniature's 54mm Blackbeard figure, which I bought from Historex Agents (post and packing from Spain would have just about doubled the cost of the figure)
This was only my second 54mm figure, the first being a WW2 British soldier from one of the Dragon kits. It turned out to be quite a bit different in terms of painting :-)
The two main lessons I learned were:
Lesson 1: Don't rush to glue the figure together
I always clean and glue my figures before painting them. Always have, always will, really shouldn't have with this one. I glued the figure, filled in some gaps, put it on a painting base and started to paint. This was fine for the head and jacket, etc., but getting in to the pistols under the arms, and especially the back of his left leg, was a nightmare. In the end I managed to get a bit of paint on the leg, but there are some unpainted areas. Had I painted the parts separately and brought them together, it would have been much easier.
The most annoying result of pre building was that his cutlass, which is soft metal, ended up getting crushed against his right leg due to the way I held the figure to get access to some parts. In the end it had shaped itself around the creases in the trousers. I managed to get most of the kinks out, but its undercoat had cracked and I didn't do a particularly good job of smoothing it back out (I should really have sanded the whole part back, but it was soft metal, and I wasn't sure how it would handle it. I opted to simply repaint it, but it didn't really work). The result is that the cutlass is kindof bumpy, and definitely a weak part of the finished figure.
Lesson 2: You can never clean the figure enough
Even though I spent a long time scraping and sanding mold lines, I still missed a couple. They made their presence known as I was painting them, but as they weren't too bad, I ignored them (it would have caused more damage if I'd gone back in to sand them down, so it was the lesser of two evils. Honest). Next time, I plan to examine the undercoated figure under my magnifying lamp before starting, although I'm sure I'll still miss some bits.
Close up of the top half of the figure
In addition to those lessons, there were quite a few things encountered during the painting and basing of the figure.
Painting the figure
This progressed steadily, although slowly. I chickened out of a few things - trying to get the leathery sunburned look on his face and stripes and mud on the trousers being the main ones.
My usual approach with a figure is to get all the base colours on, then shade and highlight them. For this figure I finished each part completely before moving on to the next part. The result of this was that the figure, pretty much until it was finished, always looked half-done. This was quite frustrating - spending an hour painting a part and not seeing the overall figure move on - but I got used to it.
When I started the figure, I was still adding extender to my acrylic to let me paint with it for a reasonable time. Not too long in, however, I took the plunge with a wet palette, and I have to say, it's the best thing, ever :-) I bought the Winsor and Newton one, but now use my own, made with a plastic palette, a couple of paper towels and some parchment (grease proof) paper. Having thin paints that stay useable for hours/days/weeks is much better; laying down thin coats and blending colours is so much easier than it used to be.
Picture of the back of the completed figure
Handling the figure
With the best will in the world, and even with a painting base (an old vitamin pill box), I still handled the figure while painting - especially when painting high up on the figure, e.g. the hat, or with the figure held upside down to get at some difficult to reach areas. I had the same problem with the WW2 figure, and it ended up with the paint becoming discoloured from body oil, sweat etc. The solution I found was to wear a cotton glove on my figure holding hand. I had thought about plastic or latex/nitrile gloves, but wearing them for an hour or more would have been unpleasant. The cotton let my hand breath, and avoided any damage to the figure. It now actually feels strange painting without one.
Closeup of one of his sets of pistols. Attaching the right arm before painting these caused a lot of pain.
Basing the figure
I had planned to put the figure on a plinth, but hadn't drilled out the figure base for pins. I ended up doing this after the model was finished and removed from its painting stand. I didn't damage it, but this is definitely something to do before starting a figure.
One thing I considered, but didn't do (largely due to time constraints), was to extend the base to the edge of the plinth using sand. This would have taken a lot of PVA, and may well have been a disaster (I don't get on well with scenery, but it's something I'm working on). The figure actually looks fine on its own base, so it's not really a problem.
The nameplate caused a ridiculous number of problems, for what should have been an easy bit. I bought a brass plate from NameIT, but it wouldn't bend enough to go round the plinth (would have been so much easier with a square plinth), so I had to abandon that approach. In the end I found a tutorial about making nameplates using overhead projector sheets. I created a few, and they worked pretty well. The tutorial recommended spraying the back of the nameplate with gold paint and then attaching it to the plinth. Another one I found suggested gluing the acetate onto cardboard before attaching it to the plinth.
I went with the cardboard option, which would have been fine on a square plinth. The weight of the cardboard, however, started to pull it away from the double-sided sticky tape attaching it to the plinth. I ended up using a couple of blobs of epoxy to stick it down, as I wasn't not sure how much damage the sticky tape would have done if I'd tried to remove it.
Despite taking great care when putting the nameplate on, it's not quite straight, and is about 1/4 mm higher at the left than the right. This is compounded by the fact that the nameplate itself isn't quite square (my cutting was not quite as good as it could have been). The effect is noticeable, but not too much. Next time I plan to put masking tape underneath the nameplate as a guide ruler.
Showing the trim and decoration at the back of his coat. I only noticed the chip in one of the folds from this photograph. It has been fixed on the final model.
I took the pictures after the figure was painted, but before I put it on its plinth. It's now in my parent's place, so the above photos will have to do.
Like I said, this was only my second 54mm figure, and quite a change from the WW2 figure. I find painting the larger scale very different to painting 28mm figures, although I have been feeding some of the things I've learned back into those figures.