Painting WotR figures

Step 1 : cloth garments 

Here's an overview of how I am painting my Wars of the Roses retinue. I primed white and then washed all over with a light brown/khaki colour. The wash removes the starkness of the white and provides a useful guide to all the details. Each of the steps below equates to one painting session of around an hour or two.

The first step is to paint all the cloth and garment areas, with mostly creams and off-whites for the quilted jackets. Grey and dull red/burgundy are key colours, but I also included some brighter red for the better off troops, and some browns and earths for the peasantry. There's a basic, though not rigid, theme of brighter colours twinned with better armour.

Step 2 : leathers and flesh 

The next step is to continue with painting base colours, this time the leathers and flesh areas. The straps, bags and boots are painted in various browns. The brigandine jackets are painted light grey, the base colour for the white. The flesh is painted in my own mix, which roughly equates to the old GW tallarn flesh, plus a little green (to remove the orange cast), plus white to desaturate the tone. I have two flesh colours ready mixed and will use various combinations of these two pots.

Step 3 : weapons and armour

The third step is to paint the armour and weapons. The wooden shafts of the bills gets an orange-brown, while the armour gets a coat of chainmail. I also spotted a couple of gloves and straps that had been missed and filled these in. Not many colours, but a longer session because of the brigandine jackets, which ironically are not that riveting to paint. You could easily miss these out, it may have been that the rivets would all have been painted or covered in leather or fabric.

Step 4 : glazing and shading

Now that all the base colours are applied, it's time to shade and highlight. I generally try to do this with as little effort as possible, so washes and glazes are used whenever possible, with minimal highlighting. I mix up a glaze of the base colour plus a darker shade, add a little matt varnish to increase viscosity, then glaze. In this session I have painted the first glazes on the lighter garments, the weapon hafts and some of the leather areas.

Step 5 : shading and highlighting metals

More shading in this step, all the metal areas. I want the armour to look quite bright, so I mix up blue, brown, green to give me a variety of grey/blue shades. These are glazed on as usual. Any areas that require a highlight I wipe off the glaze with the side of my brush bristles to leave the original metal colour showing through. I also re-highlighted the very bright areas with the original chainmail colour.

Step 6 : shades and highlights, more shades 

More shading and a little weathering in this final step. The flesh is shaded with coat d'arms super wash light brown. Any light leather areas may well get a dab of this too. Then I highlighted the padded jackets with creams and ivory to give a little definition. More brown shading on eyes, lips and leathers, a little of which is also randomly stippled on legs and a few jackets to give a little dirt effect here and there. The final shading is with green grey, which when used in conjunction with previously shaded browns gives a nice murky effect for dirty trousers, and when used on light areas adds a nice shadow effect - here I use it on chins and cream clothing, and to define some areas of the bringandines. And that's about it for these figures, just basing to do, at which stage I may also dab in a little extra brown shading here and there if I think it's needed.