Fade to Grey

I'll apologise in advance as this is probably not very interesting to most people. But I have spent the evening trying out a new painting style (for me anyway) and thought I would share.

Basically I am going to be assembling a Covenanter ECW army in 28mm in the near future. I already have some figures, as per my earlier post, but I was concerned that my usual painting method of starting with a dark colour and lightening it up to a highlight (usually over 4 to 5 coats for a war-gaming figure, if I was painting a one of figure for my mini cabinet it might be way more) would result in me taking just way way to long to assemble the force. My fear was also that this technique would result in me suffering with project fatigue quite quickly.

So having spent some time looking over some Blogs and the usual hordes of information online I noticed that a lot of people seem to use the Tri-Colour technique to paint big groups of figures. What you  see above is an hour or so's messing around with some figures testing out the colour Grey using the Tri-Colour concept.

I don't have a proper "Tri- Colour" set so I just picked three Grey's from my paint collection that looked like a reasonable match. As such the finish will never look right on the above figures as the paints I have used are just that little bit to far apart tonally, but it let me try the technique and I can see if I am failing technically without needing the right colours.

(Yes I know this is basically a post about me painting Grey on trousers 5 times, dull huh)

So my first attempt at the technique is on the far right labeled as 1 and the last attempt is number 5 on the far left. Some close ups below. There pretty rough as this was just to try the technique not paint a figure for display or anything. Also I have only painted the trousers on each figure so the rest of the figure is just undercoat.

Now I think number 5 shows promise technically speaking as I think I have broadly grasped the way this Tri-Colour thingy should work. It's not super pretty or anything but I think with the right Tri-Colour set applied in this way I can quickly produce  blocks of ECW infantry that look pretty good, and will certainly meet the 2 feet does it look good on the table test.

As I said before colour wise this test set were doomed never to look right as I just didn't have colours that matched closely enough, but I think its enough to tell if I am getting it right or not.

If anyone has made it this far, thanks for reading, and if you have any comments, tips etc regarding Tri-Colour please do leave a comment.

Thanks