Blue Moon Cowboy of the Month

Though my teaching and committee schedule has been busy this semester, I actually took some time to sit down and get a bit of painting done last weekend and this. Inspired by Adventures in Lead's "Photography blues" recent blog post about just grabbing the old digital camera and quickly shooting a shot on the workbench, I snapped some photos of what I've been working on. I used a large yellow envelope as a background. Like I said, grab and shoot.

The first snap I'm posting is of Blue Moon's (Old Glory) June cowboy of the month freebie, CP-11. I got it a few years ago as a member of the Old Glory Army. It, along with several other figures, have been sitting in the drawer partially finished for the past two or three years. Getting sick of seeing this figure lingering about, I finished it off last Friday afternoon. Not the best of my work, but it looks good enough on the game table.

Vest Stripes
I think I posted a while back how painting stripes (and any kind of straight line) scares me to death because my hands shake something fierce when painting. Painting highlights on clothing is also challenging. How I envy painters with steady hands! On this figure, I bit the bullet and tried painting some ivory-colored stripes on his light-blue vest. Forgive me for tooting my own horn, but I actually like how they turned out. A first!

Holster
I found another nice color for painting holsters: Americana's Antique Maroon. It has a reddish leather look. I added some Ivory to it for the highlights, but Antique Rose turned out to be the same color. Go figure! After I painted the highlights, I recalled reading somewhere that adding orange to the red leather would make a good highlight. Not sure about that. I'll have to try it next time.

Coat
The base color coat is Ceramcoat Charcoal, with black shadows and Ceramcoat Dolphin Grey highlights. Memo to myself: try using Rain Grey next time. Dolphin is a bit too harsh I think.

Trousers
I have no idea what color I painted these three years ago! Highlights and shadows are too subtle, as I suspected. Oh well. I don't feel like messing with this figure anymore! Memo: write down the colors for each miniature I paint and then don't lose the notes. That last bit is really important, Bob. Really really important.

Hair and Beard
I like the way the hair and beard turned out. (toot toot!) While looking in the mirror, I tried matching various shades of browns and tans to my own hair, holding the bottles next to what little hair I have left. An odd sight to behold. I painted Ceramcoat Espresso over the black primer. The paint is thin (even though it claims to be opaque) and allows black to show through quite a bit. No problem this time though. Espresso is the just shadow color. If Espresso is unavailable, any darkish brown will do. I just had Espresso handy and never get to use it. It's one of those "orphan" colors that never gets to play with all the other colors. Next I applied the base color, Ceramcoat Territorial Beige, one of the most useful browns made. The highlight is Ceramcoat Trail Tan, another useful color. With each new color, make sure to let the previous colors show a bit.

Well, that's it. Now that I posted my painting info, I will not lose it like I did most of my painting notes a couple weeks ago. Is there an emoticon for smacking myself in the head?