derailed

As noted elsewhere, I enjoy painting miniatures, but I'm really not that great at it. My best work matches up to a lot of people's version of table-ready. A lot of it is my lack of patience for doing details (because detailing is hard.) And while I can put in the effort and churn out something decent, it doesn't happen often enough.

Last night, I had a couple hours to myself, so I sat down to get started painting my sefadu for Mercs. I had a decent concept in mind. Khaki uniforms, with the armor painted black and white, in the style of Zulu shields. Red highlights. Some tribal-ish personalization between the figs, etc. 

(Sidenote: Mercs has an interesting background, where conflicts between megacorps are fought solely between very small units, in an almost formalized fashion. This lends me to think of sports teams more than anything else, and IMHO strong personalities would want to personalize their gear and style even more. And sefadu could definitely lean towards a little flashy. They're not going to be hiding in camouflage and stealthing around, they want you to see it coming. Anyways.)

So, yes. Great plans for these figs. Sit down to paint, and... man, once I get the brush to the fig, they really have a lot more uniform than I was expecting, and a lot less armor than I was expecting. Like, I seriously don't think my hamfisted attempts to mimic a Zulu shield will come across, at all. Now, we rethink the paint scheme. Will have to tone down the khaki, since it covers a lot more of the fig than I expected. White will look good on what armor they have, and will show off personalized details too. For me, I can think about colors I want to use ahead of time, but it's not until I pick up the fig and start painting that I really decide how to make it work, and that often means some left turns like this.