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Dromedary Dilemma

Painting the Figures

Both human figures used in this scene are Model Victoria. The driver came with the Topolino kit and the other man is their Italian Tank Crewman (MV4031). Both are molded in just two pieces, the body and the head, and both have beautiful detail. It appeared to me, however, that the driver figure was somewhat smaller in scale than the standing figure, but it was not a big difference. As far as painting the figures goes, there are many articles available on this subject on the internet, so I won’t go into too much detail, but I will give my impressions on working with artist’s oil paints for the first time.

I used oils paints for the exposed skin areas of the Italians and enamels for the uniforms. The main advantage of oils is that they blend very nicely. This is due to their long drying time. It took three days for my figures to dry. The technique I used for painting the faces was straight out of Shep Paine’s book, How to Build Dioramas. First, an undercoat of acrylic paint (in my case, Tamiya Flesh) is needed. I painted the eyes right after this, using a pinkish white with a black dot in the middle. When I put on the first oil coat, I carefully went around the eyes, creating the proper shape. I mixed Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre, and Titanium White to make the base skin colour, adding a bit more Burnt Sienna than one would normally do to make the soldiers look well tanned from being in the North African desert. Two different highlights were made by adding different amounts of white and the shadow shades by adding extra Burnt Sienna. I painted one highlight and one shadow, then blended them, to get rid of the sharp lines, using a fine brush and being careful not to blend so far that the face became one colour. The lighter highlight and darker shadow followed, but only in small areas, blending as before. Finally, a touch of pink was given to the lips and cheeks. This same technique was used on the arms and legs of the standing figure. I was fairly pleased with my first attempt using oils, though next time I might try it without the extra shadow and highlight. I also believe that painting the eyes is not necessary, as the scale is so small.
 

Painting the Camel

It is probably not surprising that Verlinden’s dromedary (VP1491) was the first camel I had ever painted. As far as the resin kit goes, Verlinden did a good job. It looks good and the pieces fit together quite well. I had a lot of help from members of this site on how to go about painting this beast and, in the end, I combined a number of methods to make one of my own. First, an undercoat of Tamiya Buff acrylic paint was airbrushed onto the camel, which was quite large (as big as the Topolino, in fact). I elected to use oils again and mixed up a tan colour using Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Red, Titanium White, and Ivory Black. It’s amazing what dull colours can be made by mixing bright ones. This tan was brushed all over the camel and I was quite impressed when the oils left no brush streaks, whatsoever. Like the men’s faces, I made a shadow and a highlight, adding black and white to the base colour, respectively. The black made the colour kind of gray, but this was what I was looking for. These colours were roughly blotched onto the still wet camel and then blended to get the effect seen in the pictures.

Copyright ©2002 - Text and Photos by Nicolas Virtue (folgore). All Rights Reserved.