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Yesterday was the second Saturday of the month so I was off painting with the CMPA. This month we tried out a new spot; Atomic Games. Its a nice little store, the air conditioner actually works so that's a huge plus! I did manage to almost finish blocking out the colors on the Danes, not quite but pretty close. Normally I go in and finish the shading and highlighting in each area. I'm trying a different approach this time around and see if it makes it feel like I'm making more progress. Visually these are looking pretty good at the moment.

I decided to re-prime the horses that I had done with the Tamiya Hull Red and Camel Yellow. This time I opted for Army Painter Fur Brown and Desert Yellow. I think I like these colors better. Here they are after I have applied the oil paint and rubbed it off.

Army Painter Desert Yellow
 Army Painter Fur Brown
 Army Painter Leather Brown
 A few in progress shots.

I'm finally getting some paint on these guys. This bunch will be a unit of Danish Arquebusiers so I will try and not make them look to uniform, I'll leave that to the Cuirassier units. I didn't really get that much done last night but at least some progress is being made. I basically painted most of the metal bits black and painted the manes and tails of the horses. Definitely have a ways to go, the horses all need hooves, socks, blazes, noses and eyes painted, plus a few highlights.

Just over 24 hours after priming I tried again with the oil wipe technique. Much better this time. I still managed to rub down to bare metal but only in very small spots so I can deal with that. I really like the way the burnt umber went on the Army Painter, Brown Leather, but not so happy with the Tamiya Dull Red or Camel Yellow. First I managed to rub away to much of the Dull Red off, so first lesson (which I already knew) enamel still isn't primer. I'm going to check to see what Army Painter has for Red or Yellow types of primers when I have a chance this week. In the meantime the first unit of cavalry is drying and should be ready for painting tomorrow. I may go ahead and rub down the rest of the brown leather primed cavalry,

So here are a few pictures of today's results.
Here are all six of the brown primed cavalry for the King's Cuirassier Regiment.




Red primed horse, brown primed rider

The initial fiasco with the oil wash at least let me catch up all the cavalry so its all ready to prime. Each unit will consist of four bases with three mounted miniatures on each one. Christian IV had pretty deep pockets at this point in time having defeated Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus during the Kalamar War and controlling the shipping into and out of the Baltic.

All of these are Bicorne Miniatures and mostly out of the California lot that I purchased.These required the most work. Horses had to be removed from the bases (and I'm most impressed on the amount of super glue that was used for this purpose) and I attempted to removed the riders. I think he may have used epoxy to glue the riders on because they aren't budging from the backs of those horses. None of the mold lines had been so that took some extra time too. The last unit came from the Colorado lot. Riders and horses were still separate and a start had been made to clean up the castings.  So some 50 odd castings later I'm ready to try and apply primer again.

So I was pretty excited and Thursday I was ready to give my first attempt at using the oil wipe technique. I pulled out my water soluble Windsor Newton Burnt Umber and mixed up a nice wash, a little thicker than my acrylic washes but thin enough to flow into the depths of the detail.

I grabbed five of the Arquebusier Cavalry and applied a nice liberal wash and in my high dry climate I figured that was a long enough wait, I didn't want it to dry on me. I took a some cotton rags and started to lightly rub off the wash. Looked good at the start but then I noticed that I was rubbing down to bare metal. I tried it on the next letting up on the pressure I was applying. No go, still taking paint down to the bare metal.

I finished rubbing the five figures that I started with and could see quite a variation on how much metal was now visible. Clearly not a successful evening. I have used the Vallejo acrylic primers with a lot of success but I have never subjected them to this kind of pressure before and obviously it was not up to the task. My only good choice was to strip everything down to the bare metal again and go with an enamel or lacquer primer.

I have a couple of different paints I'm going to try this time. First up will be Army Painter Leather Brown (and actually is a primer) and three Tamiya colors: TS-33 Dull Red, TS-62 Nato Brown and TS-34 Camel Yellow. Why not Humbrol as used by Metal Mountain? Because Humbrol is not readily available in my area except in small pots and I wasn't going to be home this weekend and wouldn't have access to my airbrush. I figure what I have on hand right now should do the trick.

Of course now that I have everything stripped (and found a few more mold lines to deal with) its raining hard and it looks like its going to keep on raining for the rest of the evening. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get some primer on these guys and they will be ready for the oil wash on Monday.

Here are some pictures of the bare pewter showing through after I wiped off the oil wash. It varies a lot, from a whole patches to just some buckles.

Well I finally made some progress today on the Danish Cavalry. I pulled out the airbrush and my bottle of Vallejo Surface Primer (RAL 8000 German Green Brown). I'm pretty happy with the primer coat on these, looks nice and smooth, no fuzzies.

For me the prepping process of getting miniatures ready to paint can really be a drag especially for an army. I was hoping to have all the Bicorne Miniatures Cavalry ready to prime by today. That is not going to happen, between working late every night this week and discovering that the previous owner must have used a bottle of glue on each one he assembled progress has been slow. Not being able to get the riders off is going to cause a little bit more work when I go in to airbrush the horses, I'll just have to mask them off or be a little more careful with them. I'm also going to try a different technique with these. I was reading the Metal Mountain blog (http://themetalmountain.blogspot.com/) and he uses the oil rub technique. He applies a colored primer (brown in this case) and their first dark shade with the a heavy, heavy wash of burnt umber (I think, I'll double check that before I do it) which is then rubbed off before it dries completely . I really like this look on his ECW miniatures so I'm going to give it a try on mine and see how it goes. I see similarities between his technique and my own style so I'm hoping I can pick it up pretty quick. The main difference will be that I'm going to try it with the water soluble oil paints and see how that works. I had hoped to have these miniatures ready to paint this weekend but since I didn't quite get to the priming step last night with the first dozen cavalry that's not going to happen. Looks like my LoTR Helmingas are going to get some brush work instead.

For those who may have missed it this little guy is most likely ECWC-004 from Bicorne Miniatures. Now I'll get some guys with Carbines in their hands to round out the unit.

I have been going through these miniatures this weekend and picking out which units I would like to have ready for the army painting competition at the convention. I was sorting through the cavalry first. There is a ton of Wargames Foundry Cavalry in here and its significantly smaller than the Bicorne Cavalry. In addition at least half the horses are missing for the WF Cav. Which is a shame, I'll have to see if they will sell me just horses. Sorting through the Bicorne Cavalry I'm definitely going to have to purchase some packs to fill out the units. There is a Danish army list in FOG; Wars of Religion Western Europe 1610-1660. In this list is a requirement for a unit of Arquebusiers which is armored (or unarmored) horse with carbines.  There are eight loose miniatures that look like they would fill out this unit pretty well, unfortunately I have no idea what the Bicorne stock number is nor does Bicorne have picture of all their minis in their shop.Even if these guys are pictured it would be almost impossible to tell if they have carbines from the front photo that Bicorne has of their miniatures. These guys are in buff coats with pistols in hand, and carbines slung. Does anyone know what the stock numbers for these are?

These have been identified: ECWC004 (Trooper w/ Pistol, Buff Coat, Mixed Headgear). I will fill out the unit with ECWC019 and ECWC020 which are actually holding the carbine instead of the pistol.

There are four figures here with kind of front and rear quarter shots.