Halloween, so tonight’s post is going to be a quick one. It’s been a grand ol’ time working on this blog for so long, and I feel like I’ve hit the point in my hobby journey that actually working on and completing projects is a natural extension of my general routine.

I also just got some mail from my brother – as he is in Germany, he was able to make it to Essen Spiel last weekend and quite graciously picked up my Freebooter’s Fate order from there, mailing it home to me. I’m honestly surprised it got here as quickly as it did, but that means I’m now in possession of all the templates that I’ll ever need, a bunch of models to fill in gaps in my collection, and some of the cool new releases from Essen. While reviewing stuff like that is a bit beyond the remit of the blog, I think that you should hear from me that the new version of Blackbeard is a Leader for Pirates, which is absolutely incredible.

Enough yammering, however, here’s some information on today’s miniature.

The Humble Sailor

Once again, I’m not sure why my lighting is looking so stark all of a sudden, but even so, I’ve gotten a Sailor done for my Pirate crew.

As with all pirates, the Sailor gets to have some really motley equipment. I decided to really go into the sense of freedom by adding a lot of bright colors on her – the orange pants, for example, started off with a relatively dark reddish-brown and then were highlighted with Serpentbite Leather, followed by further highlights and glazes of Scrofulous Brown and Orange Browns to make them really stand out.

For the striped stockings (which are just now making me think of Pippi Longstocking, that classic Astrid Lindgren character), I started a bit unusually for me – I mixed a dark green with a warm gray for my shadows and base tones. Then, I highlighted it up to an off-white using various warm grays and whites, keeping the greens in the shadows to give it just a hint of color and interest. Then, once I’d painted the stockings fully, I started freehanding the stripes, beginning with VMC Black-Red and ending up with the final highlight in Khador Red. This really helps them look distinct on the model, and when the highlights aren’t washed out by my horrible camera and lighting skills, it gives a really great effect.

Her skin was the next thing that I feel deserves a bit of talkin’ about. I started with a dark, somewhat desaturated reddish-brown for the shadows, and then started to build it up using VMC Basic Skintone, which accidentally mixed with a bit of Pale Yellow on my wet palette. This ended up working pretty nicely, so I kept highlighting up to Sunny Skin Tone before finally adding intermediating glazes to reduce the starkness of the highlights. It gives her an almost sunburnt appearance, which I feel fits for a pirate.

Right now, there’s a lot of stuff I’d like to touch up on her, and all of the individual pirate bases need to be painted before I can start talking about taking pictures of the crew as a whole, but at this point, that’s the last Pirate for my initial demo crew, so I can hopefully write up a post about them tomorrow.

What do you do with a sober sailor, then?

Sailors are one of the cheapest Deckhands available to Pirate crews, and it shows. They’ve got a pretty similar statline to the Cuchillo, but rather than being able to throw knives, they gain the Rigger trait, letting them move vertically much more easily. I personally really like that part of them – it’s cool to be able to get around the terrain easily, so I’m hoping to have a few rigged ships that are climbable for them to play around with.

Overall, they’re a Deckhand that can accomplish objectives, and that’s pretty great.

Hobby Progress

Locura was dropped off for my painting contest today! I’m looking forward to seeing how I do with him once the judging happens. I’ve also started planning what I’d like to do for the next crew painting plans – jumping between Debonn, ELTC, and Amazons seems like it’s the plan, as well as getting my secondary Pirate and Imperial Armada crews painted, as they’re one of the easiest to explain to people.