THE TAVERN DOORS OPEN

I put up a pic a couple of posts back of some pieces I bought to make up a medieval tavern. Here's some more of the pieces, all undercoated:

ranges and ovens for the kitchen

Front door, spit roast and ovens again

Beer barrels, bar and barkeep, food prep table and an open hearth

Close up of barman polishing a tankard

They're really great little pieces, full of detail and character.  Before I begin a piece, I spend a good while examining it, looking at all the detail, thinking about what things are made of and how best to paint them. 

I started with the front door.  My basic formula for painting pieces like these goes like this:

1. Examine the piece - trim and file any loose bits of plastic or metal, file down the seams, and generally tidy up any minor casting flaws (even well-cast figures can have a bit of seam showing or spurious flashing that needs trimming off)

2. Spray undercoat in chaos black. This is the games workshop spray undercoat, and gives a very nice, matt black finish that takes my acrylics very well.  Note though: do NOT use it on styrofoam - I tried this once, and the propellant melts the foam. What was going to be a nice grassy hill became something more like a cratered moonscape.

3. Put base colours on.

4. Drybrush any drybrush colours on.

5. Ink in any lowlights

6. Paint detailing and highlights.

Sometimes I change the order, depending on the piece.  I always try to paint the deepest parts of the figure first, so any blobbing onto other parts I can cover up when I come to paint the bit I've accidentally blobbed onto.

(It's practically identical for painting figures, but for figures I do a: 1b. glue on the basing texturing.)

The majority of my paints are vallejo game color pots.  They're designed to be exact colour matches for the Games Workshop range of model colours. And they're cheaper. And I like the dripper top dispensers.  And I read on a forum somewhere that the vallejo acrylics don't wreck your brushes as quickly as the GW ones.  So if you were wondering why I use vallejo and not games workshop paints, that's why.

 I use a burnt umber brown for the wood base coat. The Vallejo
game range calls it 'charred brown' which is a rip-off of games
workshop's 'scorched brown'.  I went a bit out of order next -
I loved the 'Wanted Bad Ass Crew' poster so much I
concentrated on detailing that before I'd put the basecoat
on the stone walls and flagging. Well, they're my rules so I
can break them if I like. They're more like guidelines, anyway...

Base coat for stones done (terracotta) and drybrush for the wood. I drybrush
wood with a leather brown which brings out th grain nicely.
(cobra leather in vallejo, snakebite leather in GW) I take care to
make sure I leave the mortar joints recesses unpainted between
 the stones on the wall. Same with the lettering on the name banner
and the cracks in the plaster.
As long as you don't have too much paint on your brush, it's
not too hard to brush up to the edge of the recess, leaving
the dip unpainted.

And here's the finished front. The stones I've drybrushed with a light grey
(anita's dove grey) and I added a bit of flocking along
the bottom edge of the wall and across the top of the door to make it
feel a bit 'grown in'.  The stone flags have a mid-grey basecoat
(I used anita's acrylic charcoal grey) and then drybrushed on
the highlights with a light grey (anita's dove grey)

The reverse side. I used a brown ink over the top of the
light green curtains to make them look old and dirty.
Gun metal  is a dull silver vallejo colour (boltgun metal GW)
that I used on all the hinges/handles/latch/curtain rings.

Next time - FIRE!