"Hoo-Rah" - Brad

Brad is an all-American sports star,

captain of his high school team,

and he looks the part of the perfect sports hero. 

All the girls love him, and all the nerds are jealous.

Whatever you need, whoever the enemy,

Brad's up for the challenge. 

- Mythic Games

Hello, and welcome back to The Art of Caesura!

Today we have our first Reichbusters hero who will be standing up against the growing hordes of zombies, K9s, evil Nazi generals and other Vril Abominations: it's Brad!

I felt like painting Brad first because he looks like the archetypal US soldier that we see in the movies. It's like coming full circle to the plastic green army men I played with as a kid. 

I didn't do any research about what colour his uniform should be for the era - in a game about assaulting a Nazi castle and blasting monsters infused with alien technology, I'm not exactly worrying about historical accuracy. Instead, I'm planning to keep the baddies in blacks, and cool greys, with the red of the Vril to pop out. So to contrast them, I'm painting the goodies mostly in warmer military greens.

I had a prolonged blonde moment (a blonde few days in fact) while I was painting this guy and painted him in the most difficult fashion possible. No, I don't know why either. Long-time readers know that I generally tend to paint in the GW style (which is to say: base coat, wash, highlights), this style has its pros and cons but it generally works for me. One of the drawbacks of painting in this way is that once you have shaded an area it can be difficult to go back and do touch-ups because the shaded colour is now quite different from the base colour that was used from the bottle. 

To mitigate this downside, I usually paint all the basecoats on the model then shade the whole thing (with different shades) at the same time; that way if you make a bit of a whoopsie on a different area during the base coat stage, it isn't too hard to touch-up. The alternative to this would be to paint one area to completion before moving on. I do this sometimes, but I find is slower as I try to avoid the greater danger of flubbing over an area that I've already finished when starting the basecoat on another area. 

Painting from the "inside-out" (i.e. starting with the deepest layer of the model (often skin) and working your way out helps to avoid getting errant paint on deeper (more difficult to reach areas) after you have already painted them. 

Anyway, with those drawbacks (and mitigating techniques) ingrained, I did almost the exact opposite! I leveraged this drawback and augmented it by - for some reason - painting his clothing first then his BACKPACK and leather straps(!), shading them, and highlighting them and then going back to paint his skin. Yeah, I don't know what came over me either. Maybe I was feverish or something. 

This made quite a straight-forward model exponentially more difficult as I tried to paint bits of green and skin around completed brown areas. It likely would have been much quicker to just start over once I had realized my gaff, but I have a "Y" chromosome which means I had to keep stubbornly forging ahead through (my own, self-inflicted) adversity. 

Don't even get me started on the fact that the Runefang Steel that I used (with the intent that it would be a medium silver to set it from apart from the darker Leadbelcher that I use on the baddies) had separated and when re-constituted turned out blindingly bright, so took lashings of Nuln Oil to tone it down. 

In the end, you'd never know the struggle I went through, which I guess is a point of pride. But man, oh man, I'm sure I could have had him done to the same standard in half the time if I hadn't seemingly been painting in fugue state!

In some ways its nice and humbling that even after decades of miniature painting we can still cock it all up, stubbornly work through it and come out okay in the end. As Calvin's dad would say "it builds character!"

Join me next week on The Art of Caesura!

Gaming: Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm

Reading: The Lies of Locke Lamora - Scott Lynch

Next Week:

Accoutrements...