Konflikt 47 - Czech Partisan Platoon Commander in looted Stahlrüstung

 

I finally found the energy to set up my camera and studio lights for a proper picture of my platoon commander. The model is one of the Konflikt 47 Event Exclusives, slightly modified to fit the theme of my army. I repositioned the arm with the knife and replaced it with a banner pole(stolen from a victrix knight). Instead of the original bare head I stole the Firefly mask from the other event miniature(the Firefly with flamethrower). The final product is meant to represent a stolen suit of Stahlrüstung, but missing the helmet which is replaced with looted firefly gear. The army lore behind this being that my  Czech partisans worked with the US for a while, before turning on their operatives and allying themselves with the Soviet Bloc as the fanaticism of the US became clearer. 

Painting this model was an interesting challenge. At first I thought about how to best make this suit seem looted. I previously painted a test mini in a heavily damaged and chipped camo scheme and considered doing that again. Instead I decided to make this armour seem unpainted as though it was stolen somewhere in-between the production process. I looked up what bare armour plating looked like and tried to emulate the spotty slightly green look on the armour. I usually tend to not paint big metal surfaces very often and thus struggle a bit with the unique challenges of TMM. Primarily I struggle with the shift in finish when you apply the shade. It immediately mattens the metal and robs it of some of the shine. I could try and fix some of that by glazing metallics towards the edges to re-establish some of the shine again. This is where the second issue comes in for me: I cannot seem to get true metallics to glaze properly. Either I do not thin the paint enough and there is no gradient but just a block of paint or I thin it too much. Most of the time I choose to sidestep this problem by ignoring it, instead using drybrush to insinuate the gradients. Here again I used a drybrush to set some gradients and re-establish the shine. The last issue I have with painting metallics concerns the highlighting. I find that true metallics dry much faster on the brush and are harder to control. I usually end up with a way too thick highlight on the model. In summary I really struggle with TMM and despite that, I am decently happy with the result. The rest of the model went over smooth, I painted the firefly mask similar to the studio paintjob. The undersuit of the armour received a similar colour to the mask implying they made it from a repurposed firefly uniform.

In the time between me finishing this miniature and finally taking studio photos I already started two more units for the partisan army. One is a Schwerefeldprojektor manned by partisans and the other is a twist on the looted armour. Stay tuned for that second one. I also plan a squad of looted armours in the same paint scheme as this one.