The Brotherhood of Venice

With all the guards out of the way I decided to have a go at one of the assassins, of which there are 10 in the box. 4 playable characters, 4 apprentice assassins and 2 variants of Ezio. One of the two Ezio variants is a dynamic, action pose and the other is styled off one of the iconic AC II images of Ezio. The latter is also by far the easiest to work with so I selected that to paint first as it would allow me to get in some practice with the Assassin’s colour scheme on a very open and easy to paint* miniature.

I used to find white quite difficult to work with but the recent addition of a white wash to the citadel range, which is actually a pale grey, has really made that task much easier. I also experimented with the Army Painter skin tone washes and I was really pleasantly surprised. To get the skin tone I selected Dorado skin to Start and washed it with a sepia wash.  Highlights were worked up using the base coat mixed with increasing amounts of opel skin.  The highlights were taken to quite a bright tone before it was eventually finishing with a wash using the light skin tone wash.  I was aiming to get a bronzed look of someone who lives around the Mediterranean.

* By easy to paint, I mean that the pose doesn’t create any dead space whereby the models pose blocks access to parts of the miniature in terms of painting whilst not actually making it invisible.  This is incredibly common on GW miniatures…  However it was anything but easy to paint.  As a PVC miniature, it had a lot of mold lines and flash all over it, much if which was impossible to remove.  For example, you can see the problem on the hands with what I can only assume are mold lines running across the fingers.  Generally speaking it requires a knife to scrape off mold lines from PVC and because of the size of the component (tiny fingers) I couldn’t apply enough pressure to remove the mold lines without risking also removing the fingers.  Additionally, as with the guards, some of the details are very soft and not very clear, even after applying a wash – the embroidery on the lower parts of the robes for example.

Finally, a progress shot of the miniatures tray