Spartan skeletons

After a long break – long enough to forget the time I ruined a load of miniatures with an over-zealous undercoat spray can – my ‘Greek myth’ project is on the go again. General Francisco Deano, The Humble Shogun Kamikaze and I paid our first visit to Salute this year and, among other goodies, I got a set of Spartan skellingtons from Bears Head Miniatures. Here they are with the base colours blocked in:

Nice as they were, I replaced the metal shields with Victrix plastic shields to match the last batch of skeletons I painted. Here they are again, with some washes and minimal highlighting:

They worked well last time so I used shield decals from Battle Flag again, scratching parts of them away to show the shield underneath. At this point I thought I'd try using a set of Revell weathering powders on the shields. They looked good until I varnished them – the powdered reacted badly with the Humbrol matt spray, fogging the shields! Fortunately, I discovered that brushing the shields with a layer of gloss varnish removed just enough of the fog to avoid me having to pull off the shields and start again. In the picture below, the left and right miniatures have the fogged shields but the centre miniature has been restored:

I added some verdigris on the bronze, and called it day. Here come the money shots:

Although a fraction taller, the Bears Head miniatures mix well with the considerably older Citadel plastic miniatures:

For my benefit, when it is time to paint more of ’em, these are the colours I used:

Vallejo Model Colour Ivory
Vallejo Model Colour Bronze
Vallejo Model Colour Oily Steel
Vallejo Model Colour Leather Brown (also thinned for the washes on the shield)
Vallejo Model Colour Olive Drab (for outlining the joints of the hand and feet)
Vallejo Model Colour Tan Earth
DecoArt Ocean Green
Inscribe Turquoise
Cloaks base colour: Vallejo Model Colour Flat Red
Cloak shade: A mix of Vallejo Flat Red and Daley-Rowney FW Red Earth acrylic ink