Spartan - Step 1

For step 1 I paint all of the flesh tone areas first. It is important to get all of the nooks and crannies otherwise you will be forced to do this after you have applied other base colors. Getting into small places after other paint has been applied can be a bit tough.

I always try to overlap the other areas just a little when painting this first step. I always find it is easier to clean up the edges by only having to paint the next color rather than doing a back and forth between steps if I didn't get things right the first time around.

One trend I have noticed when painting minis is to use a black primer and then leave areas unpainted. I really don't like the look of the figures when they are done this way. Some of the colors are so high contrast that they end up looking like Alice the Goon from the Popeye cartoons.

I didn't know Alice was German.

(Did I just show my age with that last comment?)

Next step cloaks and tunics.

Painting Guide for Xyston Spartans - Commentary

The table below shows my particular formula for painting Xyston Spartans. First off let me say that I love the detail of the Xyston minis. I will gladly pay the extra money for them. I would much rather have a mini that looks good close up than one that only looks good from 3 feet away.

How to use the table. The table is arranged in steps. The steps are the actual order that I paint in.

1. Prep, prime and glue all the minis to nails (see previous post).
2. Paint all of the base steps first.
3. Do a good looking over of the minis and clean up any areas that may have gotten messed up while paiting the base steps.
4. Once all of the base steps are complete add the highlighting. Since highlighting rarely touches areas that border on other colors I find that doing the highlighting last keeps me from having to clean up base and highlight colors if I make a mistake.
5. After letting the minis dry thoroughly give them a wash using the formula at the bottom. I cannot take credit for this method. I found it in a Flames of War painting article on their forum. If I can find the link I will post it. (The article is how to paint a large volume of tanks if that helps for anyone wanting to search for it.)

How to read each cell in the grid. For the most part it is a single color for the specific mini part. In some cases, such as the instruments, I used a couple different colors for the various pieces. I gave two variations based on Internet and Osprey book research I did (I would love to hear of other variations if anyone has any). Some of the cells list two colors with numbers in parenthesis. The numbers are a percentage. For example, Bestial Brown/White (80/20) is mix of 80% Bestial Brown and 20% White. These are only approximations so please use caution and experiment to find out what you like best. Personally when I do my highlighting I prefer a more subtle contrast between colors that looks more natural than the other styles which use very high contrast colors. That is my personal preference. NOTE: All paints listed are Games Workshop unless specifically noted.

Once the painting is done it is on to basing and varnishing. I'll get into that in another post.

Since I have just started another batch of Spartans I will post some photos as I progress through the steps.

Painting Guide for Xyston Spartans

Spartan
Step	Item	Base	Highlight
1	Arms, Legs, Face, Feet	Dwarf Flesh	Elf and Dwarf Flesh (50/50)
2	Sword Butt	Codex Grey	none
3	Linen Cuirass	White	none
4	Garment/Robe/Tunic	Red Gore	Blood Red
5a	Skirt (1)	White	none
5b	Skirt (2)	Bestial Brown	Bestial Brown and White (80/20)
6	Helmet/Cuirass/Leggings	Bronze Mix*	none
7	Strap/Belt	Scorched Brown	Scorched Brown and White (80/20)
8a	Music Instruments (1)	Bleached Bone, Bestial Brown	none
8b	Music Instruments (2)	Bronze Mix*, Bestial Brown	none
9	Sword Sheath	Bestial Brown	Bestial Brown and White (80/20)
10	Hair	Black	German Grey (Tamiya XF-73)
11	Sword	Boltgun Metal	none
12	Spear	Bestial Brown	none
13a	Shield (Front)	Bronze Mix*	none
13b	Shield (Back)	Scorched Brown	none
	Bronze Mix	Dwarf Bronze	3 Parts
		Shinning Gold	2 Parts
		Burnished Gold	1-2 Parts
	Wash	Black and Burnt Umber Artists Paints (50/50)	Step 1 - mix paints
		Black/Burnt Umber Mix and Turpentine (20/80)	Step 2 - mix paint with turpentine
			Step 3 - apply to model

 

How to create a grid in a blog post using Excel

Wow - what a pain trying to put a grid into a blog post! After several hours of struggling I finally figured out the magic formula. (Of course there is almost certainly an easier method so feel free to post comments.)

This is what I finally came up with - 1378 easy to follow steps. :-)

1. Create your Excel spreadsheet - complete with grid lines, etc. You have to add the grid lines in Excel or they won't come through in the blog.

2. Copy all of the cells you are interested in.

3. Paste Special - HTML into MS Word. (This will appear as a grid just like you see it in Excel.)

4. Save the document as a web-page from MS Word.

5. Open the saved htm/html document in Notepad and copy all of the text.

6. Paste the text into a new MS Word document. (This will appear as the html text - not the grid you saw in Excel.)

7. VERY IMPORTANT: Choose Edit/Replace/More/Special and replace all "Paragrah Marks" and "Tab Characters" with nothing. For some reason if these characters are in the html you use for your blog post they will be rendered in the actual blog post and your grid will be 5 pages from the top of the blog and a complete mess.

8. Copy all the text to the html version of a new blog post and publish. You will almost certainly get errors which I have found you can ignore. Not sure the affect of doing that since the blog looked fine for me. It may mean that certain browsers/OS will not see the post correctly due to specifics in the html that may not be supported.

9. ALSO VERY IMPORTANT: Once the grid is published don't do anything to it such as editing, composing, etc. Once you reopen the blog the blog post editor will mess up the formating and you will be doing this all over again.

If you have any tips on how to make this process easier please share them. It would be nice if I could do this in as few steps as possible.

One final note - I had to change the formatting of my blog so that I could see all of the content of the grid. When the grid is wide some blogs will cut off the extra and won't provide scrolling or stretching capability. Play around with the different styles until you find one you like.