A Foray into Napoleonic Wargaming
Planning tartan
Progress on regular line infantry has been good, with a dozen of the lads ready for basing. I’m aiming to get the other half of the regiment painted for the end of the month.
I’ve also been planning how to approach painting tartan for the highlanders, as I’ll be tackling them once I’ve finished the line regiment. I’m going to have two highland regiments, The Black Watch (42nd regiment) and the Gordon Highlanders (92nd regiment). Before attempting the kilts on the models, I painted a quick trial on paper (also to act as a memory aid). Basically I want to achieve a relatively good approximation of the tartan that isn’t too time consuming or fiddly that works at 15mm scale.
These are the patterns I'm aiming to represent - Black Watch on the left, Gordon Highlanders on the right
Here's my step by step process for each pattern (all Vallejo paints) (a slightly terrible image I'm afraid)For the Black Watch I think I’m going to omit the lighter Prussian Blue squares, and retain them for the Gordon Highlanders.
A summary of my intended paint schemes:
- Both patterns start the same way, with a base of Dark Prussian Blue.
- Next a grid of German Camo Extra Dark Green. Two horizontal lines will be appropriate for the scale of the models.
- At the intersection of the dark green lines, paint a square (more likely a blob) of Flat Green.
- At this point the patterns diverge. For the Black Watch a thin line of Dark Prussian Blue is painted over the green grid.
- A square (blob) of Prussian Blue is added between the green grid for the Gordons.
- A thin line of Sun Yellow is painted over the green grid.
Hopefully it will look good on the models.
Good luck with the tartan, your little swatches look good… I might steal them for my Celts!
I’ve had good results on 28mm figures with the following scheme:
– dark green base
– light green grid
– white squares at the intersections
– a thin black or dark blue line over the grid
– a thin red line between the grid <- not something I want to try on smaller scale models, but looks pretty good.