Young Miniatures - Obergefreiter, Operation Barbarrossa, 1941

I just though I'll take a short break from sculpting (and everything else) to wet my brushes in the palette with this box art assignment from Young Miniatures. Sculpted by Ebroin, this extensively designed bust provided me the needed opportunity to further my studies into the impressionist concepts of color usage.

With the exception of attaching the right wrist and MG sling to the MG-34,
the assembly for this kit was rather straightforward. I resolved the alignment issues during the test fitting phase by interfacing connecting parts with magnets before committing the super glue.

This process also made handling of sub assemblies much convenient as they could easily be attached to a "helping hand" during the various processes of painting.

There was no significant departure to my usual process of airbrushing on the local colors over a dark undercoat(in this case dark violet). My palette consisted of limited colors; mainly consisting of primaries and secondaries. Most of the shades and tones of the field grey tunic were mixed from magenta, orange, pastel blue and park green. Glazes of violet and blue were used in lieu of black for the shadows, with an occasional dash of orange to create the impression of brown dirt. The key reason of rejecting stock-mixed colors was to also create more reiterations of a singe tone as a result of inconsistent mixing of their parent colors. This inadvertently allows more subtle tonal variations to occur whereby no single tone will be exactly the same throughout.

Special attention however was devoted to the effects of bounced light onto lighter colored surfaces for greater atmospheric effect.

This concludes my recreational assignment from Young Miniatures and hopefully the next update will be on the long protracted sculpt for Alpine Miniatures.

Calvin