Never is the distinction between painting for realism and painting for the tabletop more obvious than when it's time to paint some camouflage. Miniatures need to be readable from four feet away; relatively speaking that's like a commando trying to sneak up on someone in Elton John's iconic ensembles.
Since we want our tiny tacticool terrors to look like they're ready to do the right kind of slaying, this means painting something that yearns to be camo, but isn't. I knew this to be true when I started painting three Eliminators for my Cobalt Scions.
This didn't stop me screwing it up.
I thought I was being clever. It seemed like a good idea to take the official camo scheme on the Eliminators, with all their sharp angles, but just change the colours to vaguely match my basing scheme, so browns and greens and greys.
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| The original scheme. Copyright Games Workshop; used for illustrative purposes only to show the kind of shapes I used. This of course has been executed by a much better painter and in different colours. |
I lovingly layered up the sergeant's cloak accordingly and, after an hour or so, proudly held the miniature at arm's length.
It was a total mess.
Just utterly unreadable as a shape.
The folds of the fabric were drowned out by the visual disruption of camouflage doing exactly what it's meant to. The 'Eavy Metal Team's paint job works because the cloaks are just different shades of one 'colour': grey. They can share universal shading and highlights, which keeps the shape readable.
Having reflected upon their successes and my failures, I painted the cloak again but with much more closely aligned colours, essentially starting from a mid-brown base and mixing in small amounts of green/grey to nudge the colour into different tones.
This also sucked, since it looked fine up close, but like a patchy basecoat from a distance.
It was time for a different approach. One I'd be willing to photograph. A less vain painter would have had the foresight to photograph his mistakes, but ah well.
Third time's a charm
For my third (and, thankfully, final) approach, I decided to go for a largely tan cloak, with horizontal green tiger stripe-like markings. Since the stripes would be perpendicular to the majority of the folds in the cloth, my hope was that the model would still read clearly, but the colours would be broadly (broadly!) appropriate for the palette of my army's basing scheme.
I base coated the cloak with a tan colour (Vallejo Game Color 062 - Earth) and then mixed in some Burnt Umber (again, from Vallejo) for the recesses, and a bone colour (Army Painter's Skeleton Bone) for the highlights. Using a wet palette helped to maintain those custom mixes across the three cloaks I needed to paint.
With the tan colour finished, I then painted olive green tiger stripes (Vallejo Olive Grey). These also needed highlights and shades to sit well alongside the highlighting on the tan colour, and I did so by mixing a little bone and a little black into the green to provide highlights and shading.
After all this, any sharp recesses got a recess shade using Reaper's brown liner. I looked at the minis at a distance, and: thankfully they still read clearly, and in a colour palette that made some sense. I splattered some Citadel Typhus Corrosion over the hems to muddy them up a little, and called it a day.
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| Poor Sergeant Viriathus Audax had his cloak painted 3 times. |
Replacing the hero rocks
The keen-eyed will detect that the bases on these guys do not have the standard plastic hero rocks. The stock kit is particularly rife with hero rocks, and they're urban-coded. Great news if you're doing an urban scheme, but I'm not. Undeterred, I built them stock, hero rocks and all, then encased those rocks in green stuff, and prodded that green stuff with a rounded tool (the lubricated end of a paint brush would do) to add a little texture that'd pick up drybrushing OK.
What next for the Cobalt Scions?
These three snipers were the last guys missing from Squad VIII, bringing my total body count to 90 squad members plus auxilia and command crew. After five years, the army is alarmingly close to becoming a full battle company. I've got five Assault Intercessors with jump packs on deck, then it's 6 Eradicators and another Lieutenant to finish the full Third Company.
Delicious.
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