Painting dreadfleet

After the sails on the terrain pieces, I wasn’t looking forward to painting the sails on the Heldenhammer. This time I have no black primer to fight, but it will be tricky to get a good result. My initial plan was to leave the sails white. But since this is a flagship and the sails will draw the attention on the finished model, I will try to paint them. The images on the sails will be painted in Model Color Blue, while the rest of the sails remain white. No other colours will be used.

Some brown paint from the spar (let’s hope this is the correct naval term) ended up on the sail. With thinned down white paint, I’ve started to remove these brown stains. Watered down to prevent a thick layer of paint remaining on the sail. That would certainly look bad.

For the images on the sails I suspect the best way to paint them is with several thin coats. As thin as possible. I struggled a bit with thinning the paint on my wet pallet. Sometimes it turned into a blue wash instead of thinned paint.

To get the best result, the sides of the raised images should be painted blue systematically. The surface of these sides narrow. Painting them requires much caution and patience. I’m not a patient man. I switched to a smaller brush to paint such small details: 4/0. It takes forever to paint with such a small brush.

The two big flags will remain white with the images in blue, just like the sails. The three small flags are painted in reverse: blue flags with a small white cross.

Having painted the main surfaces of the images white, I encountered the following problem: sometimes two blue surfaces touch each other. The line separating them is invisible. Surfaces of the images left white (eg. the big hammer) touch each other as well or they touch the white sail and the line separating them, is invisible too. To resolve this I used blue ink (Vallejo Game Ink) where two white surfaces meat and black wash (Vallejo Game Color Wash) where two blue surfaces meat. The ink worked very well. The blue paint and blue ink are a very similar blue.

After much more finalising and correcting the sails and flags are done. They are not as good as I’ld like. The sails look as if painted at a lower level of quality than the rest of the ship. I’m affraid it takes someone with better painting skills to achieve a better result.

Cannons

Finally I’ve put a little Plate Mail Metal from The Army Painter on the cannons. The black cannons were almost unnoticeable otherwise. They stand out a bit more now.

This ship has a lot of cannons. I’m looking forward to firing them!

Lessons learned

• My sails aren’t white enough. I will give the sails of the other ships an extra coat of white paint.
• The masts hinder painting the ships. I should have glued them in place after painting the ships. Painting the elven ship I’m working on at the moment, I’ve noticed the same problem.

One last thing

Look what I found on YouTube! A cracking unboxing of Dreadfleet!

https://youtu.be/62gr7LkodGQ