Horace "Action" Jackson

Horace was having a great time at a 70s-themed fancy dress party, getting down with the funky beats and chatting up two cool chicks. Suddenly the zeds invaded and since then he's been dispensing death with great vengeance and furious anger.

I started Reaper's Horace back in late November. I say started, what I actually mean is I did my usual job of procrastinating over what colours to paint him. Like my other 70s characters I wanted an authentic colour scheme, and this led me to going down a rabbit hole of polyester, flares, kipper ties and Afros as far as the eye could see after googling "black men's clothing 1970s". Horace should have taken about an hour to paint, but I didn't even get started on him before having to pack my stuff up for our move into our new house.

This was the progress I made that day:

I didn't even get around to carving the flash lines off him. But I really wanted to paint something, not just because I miss it, not just to keep my five fans happy, but mainly to give me something to do that wasn't sitting on my arse all day staring at my laptop and eating too much.

So I googled "1970s men's fashion" again, only I had the foresight to set a 30-minute timer on my phone so I didn't end up doing what I did a couple of months ago. Luckily, within five minutes I found this:

Groovy. Pink is a colour I've had a lot of practice with thanks to all my Slaanesh figures, but I'm going to have to mute it a bit. I'm not too sure about the stripes on the shirt but then again after signing up for a mortgage I'll be paying till I'm 78, nothing really scares me these days.

I started with Horace's skin, giving it two coats of Burnt Umber and a wash with Sepia Tone. Once the wash was dry I used Mahogany Brown for the highlights. His gun was given a once-over with Gunmetal and shaded with Black Wash. With that out the way I mixed the paints for his trousers. I'm not too sure how to mute colours, only darken or lighten them. I googled "how to mute pink" and found this page, which says to add yellow-green. Er... ok. I used Reaper Pink as it's lighter than the Vallejo shade and mixed it with Vallejo Green Yellow. And I'll be buggered, it worked. I added more pink to the mix to darken it and use it for the shading. 

The shirt in the photo seems to be an even paler pink, but I wanted to go lighter so used Ivory shaded with Grey Wash and highlighted with Reaper Pure White. 

Once I was happy with his clothing, I used Filthy Brown as a basecoat for the Polished Gold on his medallion and belt buckle. Black drybrushed with Dark Grey worked for his hair, and he was done.

In between painting Horace, I decided to make another backdrop for my photos. The printouts I used to use were all binned before we left California. I don't know why, it's not like five sheets of paper would have made much of a difference to the 80 or so boxes of crap we packed. I would print more but here's a quick question for you:

We've been ordering stuff since we moved into the house, and I've been saving some of the packaging for that moment when I'll really need some random foam. After literally days of waiting, that moment arrived. I took some of the foam and made a background wall to photograph my minis against.

I sliced the side off this piece of foam and slathered it with Vallejo Black. After it dried, I started drybrushing it with Dark Grey, Cold Flesh and Ash Grey. And it looked like shit. Seriously, it was just awful. I don't know if I did something wrong, but wow. So for now I'm using the wood that frames the new hole in our living room wall.