Nipponpalooza part 2 (2021 week 6)

This week we have the mounted soldiers which look unsurprisingly a lot like the foot soldiers.   Like I mentioned last week, horses do count toward the total since that's how I've got them recorded in my master list.  

These guys were a mess to assemble.  Because I bought them as bare sprues, I didn't have instructions and I fiddled with them for a long while before hitting up the intertoobs in frustration.  That was better but they were still awfully fiddly.  I didn't end up including most of the extra swords and other bejangles on these guys because again, this was supposed to be a speed paint.  

For this week I put extra time into the horses a) because I could, and b) because up to this point I'd never painted horses before.  I was helped by the fact that the riders were already painted as part of last week's festivities.  As part of my time-saving planning, I painted them all in the same pattern (Bay) with no other distinctions.  I haven't done the homework to know what's appropriate for this time period and breed and in general know very little about horses.  Someday I'll fix that, probably the next time I go out of my way to paint horses, but not today!

At this point I had horse flesh, barding, and other bejangles left to go and I got more paint on the bases for good measure.  The horses themselves were mostly painted with Daler Rowney Red Earth and Liquitex Raw Umber inks highlit with a light fleshtone, in this case, an ancient pot of Reaper paints.  I knew these were more transparent than the normal acrylics I'm used to and boy howdy were they ever.  Despite many (many) layers they only mostly cover and once I brought it all together at the end with a glaze, all of my careful highlighting evaporated.  Notably, these dry considerably darker than when they go on which was a surprise and they dry glossy which wasn't unexpected.  The barding which I only noticed I'd painted incorrectly when they were nearly complete was done with more normal acrylics with a wash throwing on some final highlights and metallics at the very end.

The bases, if you're curious, are potting bark glued to the round with texture paint and flocking to make it look less like what it actually was and they might sell better if I'd chosen less bark-like colors.  They were painted with some random palette sludge and mostly highlit with the same random fleshtone I had laying around.  This worked way better than I expected even after Vince told me that fleshtones were a good basing highlight color.  I assembled everything with the horses pinned before priming and I'm super unhappy about the leaping horse having a paper clip through its belly.  I've seen this fig on its two hind legs but the sculpt really doesn't look correct that way.  If I were bringing these guys to a higher quality level, I would have painted the riders, mounts, and bases separately and assembled them after the fact but this wasn't the goal.  

Overall, I think these guys are acceptable.  If you add a couple hours of fiddly assembling plus the six-ish hours I spent painting the mounts, we end up at 33 hours for the batch of 27 which feels reasonable given where they landed.  None of these guys are going to win any awards but that wasn't really the point.  I learned a lot about batch painting with my terrible airbrush and I'm certain I can speed this process up.  I may manufacture such an exercise later this year so watch this space!

This concludes Nipponpalooza 2021 and I'm confident in saying that I'm well ahead of both my goal and one fig per day so far this year.  I don't expect to maintain this pace but it's good (for once) to be ahead right out of the gates.

2021 finished mini counter:  56/100