Pirate Bands

I'm slowly working through my zombie survivors. However, as I'm painting them "properly", the shading and highlighting is taking forever. I wouldn't mind so much, but what little I achieve in an hour will be wiped out when I matt varnish them :-( Got to increase the contrast between base and shade/highlight!

Anyway, another of my many projects is Pirates. They're a fairly quiet side project, but a group slips onto the painting schedule occasionally. I have plenty of unpainted Pirates, mostly Foundry, Reaper and Scorpion Miniatures. To date, I've painted two bands of Foundry pirates, shown below. The first group suffer from the matt varnish effect - they were shaded and highlighted, honest. The second group don't, but that's only because I'm waiting for warmer weather before I varnish them. I'm planning to test Humbrol matt varnish on some other figures, so hopefully it'll be kinder to the paint job.

These are the Foundry Horrible Henchmen figures, and were the first group I painted. They didn't look particularly ship bound to me, so I put them on "outdoor" bases. I'm in the middle of changing my basing technique across all my figures (new paints only, I'm not mad enough to redo many hundreds of figures), as I'm not happy with the textured paint look. At the very least I need to add some static grass to the bases, just to make them a bit less bland.

The next group I painted were Henry Morgan's Crew. I clipped off the original bases and pinned them to BlackCat wooden bases. Not really crazy about the giant pistols and skulls, but I don't find them offensive enough to want to redo them :-) The next set of bases I plan to use have the wood effect as part of the base, rather than just being a base topper - and no giant hats!