We will paint with the traditional system of base color and two highlights, explained in other articles in this series, over a black base. That is, we must think of each surface to be painted (armor, buff, breeches, hands, face, etc.) as a “hermetic compartment”, delimited by the black of the primer, which we will use as lining.

On the color palette, this is a great opportunity to experiment with mixes. Although I understand the usefulness and efficacy of the standardized three-color systems already pre-established for base-first highlight-second highlight, those of you who already know me know that I adore mixtures, because they allow us to avoid standardization, individualize each figure and exploit the maximum our stock of paints. Because as we will see below, from an unique base color we can obtain very different finishes depending on what we mix it with, something that may not be as obvious as it seems. However, for this you have to distinguish between several families of browns (brown, reddish) and try to combine shades from the same family, information found in the charts of colors.

The recurrent use of the Iraqi Sand (819) can draw attention, the truth is that it is an useful sand color that allows to clarify almost any color (brown, green, even blue) in a fairly neutral way, without tending to the yellow of other sand colors or excessive white crushing. I also use a lot on the color charts Siena (113) from the Vallejo Art Deco range. It is a color that I use very regularly and if you have the Art Deco range at hand, I recommend you to get at least Siena (113), White (001) and Black (120), they are colors of much use and the greater capacity of these bottles (60 ml vs. 17 ml of Model Color) makes them very worthwhile. If this is not possible, Cork Brown (843) from the Model Color range would be its closest equivalent.

In the description of the step by step I will indicate percentages of each color in the mixtures, but they are extremely approximate and will always depend on the particular taste of each one due to a greater or lesser contrast between the three layers of color.