"Speedpainted" Austrian Tercio and Spanish Command

Hello again

This week I finished a couple of mini projects. The first one is an Imperial Austrian Tercio for 30 years war. I used 2 bases of Quickshade painted musketeers, and a base of spare pikemen I have, I painted a standard bearer, all miniatures from Warlord Games plastics, and a generic flag included in the box. I spent a little more time in the standard bearer in order to draw attention to him and the flag and not to his tabletop painted companions.

here the last base painted

Now, If I combine the 2 musketeers wings I intended to use for commanded shot or storming party, with this pike block... Voilà, we have a brand new Tercio/Regiment for the Imperials, to fight along his Habsburg cousins in Madrid against the Swedish at Nordlingen 1634, or support the Army of Flanders against Dutch or French. 

As I said, just tabletop quality, but effective, with nice base and flag, Quickshade method is not unpleasant to the eye. Of course most of my units are and will be painted with more elaborate techniques or just highlighting over the Quickshade.

The Second part of this post is the continuation of the test my friend did with the 3D modified miniatures. The next 3 miniatures are Mars 1/72 "Later Spanish" enlarged to 30mm... of course the lack of quality is evident, the miniatures themselves were poorly sculpted in their  original scale, so If you make them bigger, their shortcomings become bigger too, but nevertheles I have made a command base  for a battalia with them.  Just for fun. I hope you like it!

Speed painting ? Airbrush+Quickshade

Hi mates,

Sometimes I just dont want to paint tons of miniatures at a high standard, or spend too many hours on a single unit, when you have a lot of simultaneous projects.

I have used Army Painter's Quickshade before, using a similar technique to the one used by Master David Imrie aka Saxon Dog, in his old blog, with very good results, it saves time, but not that much.

This time I have tried a simpler method. Just airbrush the dominant colour, and paint  some miniatures in various brown tones, then block in the different colours, basecoat stuff... boring but you have to do a clean paintjob.  After that is done, the Quickshade's turn arrives. I used the "splash on" method... with a cheap brush, mid to large size, cover the entire miniature with the Quickshade, and then re touch it with a damp brush with White Spirit or turpentine, in order to remove the excess Quickshade, this is a matter of practice, you will know over time how much you have to remove or touch...

After 24-48h  you can paint over it a few highlights, just 10 minutes per miniature, nothing too fancy, and then spray matt varnish.  In my case, I had troubles (hot weather) with the varnish and it became whiteish, almost ruining some miniatures (Thank God they were cheap plastic Warlord´s ECW storming party figures)

In the next pics you can see the some samples before and after the Quickshade.

and now after... (OMG this is horrible! ... No wait, we all think the same at this stage)

Now matt varnish and a couple of brush strokes. the are near decent for tabletop standard

In my humble opinion, you can achieve decent resolts if combined with a good basing and nice flags. In this case, you can se a musketeer wing, using cheap plastic miniatures. I would not use this technique on more expensive or better sculpted miniatures, but I have at least 2 complete Pike & Shot units that I will paint quickly this way. I think it works better with earthy tones, so Thirty Years War miniatures are perfect for it.

Regards!