Many units during the Napoleonic era wore white uniforms, and the white uniform is a more difficult paint job than you might at first imagine. Lots of figure painters foolishly look forward to doing Austrians and the like. Filled with joy, their shaky hands clutch greedily for a can of spray paint. STOP! STOP! Sure I've said a lot about why you shouldn't use spray paint, but noooo; some of you are going to persist in doing it anyway. What can I say? May your can clog and your paint flake. Think about this for a moment: white has shadows and picks up colors. For our purposes there are only two colors you need to worry about, tan and blue. Blue is like snow shadows, and the mixture you're looking for is 1-2 parts of blue to 8-9 parts of white, the effect is more of an off-white than a blue. The tan you want is a light yellow ochre. The method for applying your paint is as follows: after your figure is primed with a white or off-white base and has thoroughly dried, apply a wash of your shadow color over the entire figure. "A wash," you ask, "what's that?" A wash is a watered down paint liquid enough so that it can flow over the entire figure (some people refer to this as staining). This may take some practice with mixing to get it right, but once you have paint of the proper consistency, it will settle into the cracks and folds of the figure, producing a shadow effect as it dries. Nice. Nice. Nice. But wait, we're not stopping here. When the paint is dry, we're going to SCUMBLE. What? Not another obscure term! Scumbling is an old art technique that is really effective and the more relief a figure has the better this will work. To scumble means to apply a slightly dry paint to a surface with a dry brush. This is done with a quick, light touch so that all you hit with your brush is the most raised surface detail. In the case of our white uniforms, we are using a brilliant white. Gee, that wasn't so bad, was it? But hold on. It's not quite as simple as that. Did you think I was going to let you get off so easily? I didn't put up with four years of art school for nothing! Sun Source To make a scumble appear realistic, the jolly painter must mentally construct a "sun source" for his figures before he paints them. It's not as complicated as it sounds, so calm down. Look at it this way, if your figure sits on a table, your imaginary sun source is always at ten or two o'clock high. So what you do is take your scumble brush and lightly hit the areas that would be seen by the sun source -- upper arms, legs, knees, etc. Now what should you use for a scumble brush? You need thin flats or brights. These are the brushes that you often see but figure you'd never use -- tiny house painting brushes. Happy scumbling one and all! Brushes But now that we've scumbled our way through yet another technique, perhaps we ought to talk about brushes in general. Brushes flood the market in all styles and quality levels. By and large you can only trust top brands (like Winsor-Newton) to maintain an even quality level. Unfortunately, these cost a bundle but they make up for it in durability. (What a pleasure to have a brush that doesn't immediately get eaten up by the paint and the figure, shedding all over the figure as it disintegrates.) So much for quality, now how about quantity. How many brushes do you really need? Well, basically you can get away with as little as four brushes -- two water color brushes, a size 00 or 000 for details and a 1 or 2 for larger areas; a larger (even a cheap) brush for priming; and as I mentioned above, a scumble brush. There's an old artist's trick to check out your expensive brushes to see how well the hairs are set. Many companies dip the tips of brushes in shellac to make them look nice and pointed -- don't believe it, cookies! Take the brush, twirl the tip with your fingers to break the shellac coat. Then lightly wet your fingers and draw the brush back to a point. If it goes to a point and stays there, you've got a good brush. You'll soon see the difference. So get busy and -- brush off! Back to Table of Contents -- Courier Vol. IV No. 5 Back to Courier List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1983 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com