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Author Topic: Captain Blood's ECW resurrection. P.43. Cuirassiers ride!  (Read 68368 times)

Offline Hu Rhu

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Re: Captain Blood's ECW resurrection... P.16 The Headswap Brigade ;)
« Reply #255 on: July 10, 2020, 09:39:22 AM »
Lovely additions to your force.  You could use the yellow coats as Waller's regiment if you are looking for a historical counterpart.  I believe they had yellow coats.

Offline Captain Blood

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Re: Captain Blood's ECW resurrection... P.16 The Headswap Brigade ;)
« Reply #256 on: July 12, 2020, 05:40:14 PM »
Thanks Gary. Good suggestion. I may well do that :)

Meanwhile...

Moving on from the head-swap brigade we come next to the ‘ringers brigade’ – ringers because these are the first six of a batch of painted figures I bought off eBay last week. All I’ve done is retouch them to add detail and definition, and rebase them.

It’s a slight risk. As previously mentioned, some eBay sellers cunningly disguise the shortcomings of their items by taking fuzzy images at the kind of distance where you can’t really see exactly what you’re getting. So I thought these looked reasonably well painted, and I knew some retouching would be required anyway. I felt this could be a quick way to further bulk out my ever-expanding ECW collection.

My winning bid was £100 for 24 figures (sorry if anyone else was in the hunt for these lol), which works out to about £4 per figure.

When you consider that a raw figure (new) costs £1.50 (£12 for a pack of 8 from Bicorne), you’re basically paying a premium of £2.50 per figure in order for someone else to have undertaken the grunt work of cleaning up mould lines, flash etc, undercoating, and then doing a (not too terrible) block colour paintjob. These are all steps that would have involved many hours work across two or three sessions. (Also, these are Renegade ECW figures, which haven’t been available for the last two years even if I’d wanted to buy them new).

As it turned out, the figures weren’t as well painted as they looked from the pics on eBay. What I suppose you’d call basic tabletop standard: a bit splodgy in places; block colours; a fair stab at a couple of layers of highlights on the white coats but not much in the way of discernible highlights apart from that; some use of washes. Overall, not great, but not too terrible either. Good enough to allow me to bring them up to a similar sort of standard to the rest of my collection in just a couple of painting sessions. Whereas if I’d been painting from scratch, I’d have needed several sessions to reach this finished stage on six figures.

All I’ve effectively done with them is add extra layers of highlight and detailing. For instance, they all had the same plain dark brown trousers – that provided a base for some tonal variation of browns in my additional highlight coats. That said, this approach does mean mostly accepting the colour scheme set by the original painter (apart from a couple of bits I specifically chose to alter – like giving them brown shoes instead of black). Because if you end up repainting them in their entirety, it kind of defeats the object of letting someone else do the groundwork. There are some slightly strange things here that I wouldn’t have chosen (Gold metalwork on rank and file? White straps and belts in the ECW?) But overall, following a modest amount of titivation they don’t look too bad. And I needed a whitecoat regiment anyway.

I now need to paint up six more pikemen from scratch to make up a full unit of 12 for TPL, as there were only six pikemen in this painted lot – all the rest were musketeers. They will get the same treatment, although some will get a change of coat colour to yellow. But this is certainly a time and labour-saving way of building out one’s forces – provided you can find the right raw material on eBay and acquire it at cost-effective price…







Online DintheDin

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So neat painting and this beautiful creamy white! Brilliant!  :-*
Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. – Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Offline Ray Rivers

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Bloody Beautiful.  :-*

Offline Plynkes

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They still have the unmistakable Captain Blood style, even if not all the work was done by Captain Blood. You could have just posted them and said nothing and we'd have been none the wiser I think.





With Cat-Like Tread
Upon our prey we steal...

Online OSHIROmodels

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Lovingly titivated  :)

The white belts and gold metal work do look a bit odd  :? 
cheers

James

https://www.oshiromodels.co.uk/

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Offline gamer Mac

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Nice job :-* :-* :-*

Offline Paul Richardson

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Richard,
I think it's very brave of you to buy painted figures with this approach in mind. White belts aside, the figures look great. It would be interesting to see a photo of them when they arrived compared with how they look after your titivating. I'm afraid that I always steer clear of painted figures on Ebay, unless the paint-job is so cheap that the figures can just be stripped. I used to buy painted Citadel figures on Ebay for my Dark Ages collection and then stripped them because I thought that that might well be safer than buying unpainted versions, given how long ago they must have been cast and the risk of lead-rot.

Paul

Offline Captain Blood

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It would be interesting to see a photo of them when they arrived compared with how they look after your titivating.

Thanks Paul. Here are a couple of the musketeers that I haven't started refurbishing yet...
As you can see, they're not terribly painted - just a bit messy in places with very little definition. A bit of a wash, some tentative highlighting here and there, a bit shiny in places. All kind of sketchy, pallid and without much attention to detail... But a good enough base for building on.



Compared with the refurbished pikemen...


Online OSHIROmodels

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Not a bad base to work from at all.

Offline AKULA

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Nothing wrong with getting figures with a view to a repaint, particularly if you can paint the way that you do Richard...can see where you are coming from in terms of weighing up cost versus time spent cleaning/priming etc

Some of my early Game of Thrones figures were repaints/rebased (as stated on my thread), it made sense at the time to get some figures on a table...before I got completely hooked, and decided to invest some serious time on the painting front (obviously not with quite the same end results as yourself...mores the pity).

Unfortunately too much of the stuff I see on fleabay currently is either of poor quality or overpriced that I’d be more likely to opt for something I’d seen firsthand (obviously much more difficult right now), but those end figures look excellent, so time and money well spent

 :)
« Last Edit: July 13, 2020, 11:43:03 AM by AKULA »

Offline Paul Richardson

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I think you've bought very cleverly. The originals aren't bad at all, and you've improved them hugely.

Online THE CID

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Great job refurbishing those Whitecoats, good job I didn't see them on eBay otherwise you might of had a bidding war 😂
Ive seen things you people wouldn't believe - Roy Batty.

Offline Captain Blood

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Thanks chaps  :)

It was pot luck to be honest. I thought from the (not very clear) pictures on eBay that they were actually better painted than they turned out to be once I had them in my hand. But all’s well that ends well ;)

Offline Ray Rivers

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As you can see, they're not terribly painted

True, but if you showed the guy what you did to his minis I'm willing to bet he'd be gob smacked.

Given you believe that your "cunning plan" is cost effective, perhaps in the future he would be willing to do a commission or two.

Anyway, they are still blood beautiful.

 

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