Painting Epic Pike and Shotte

 I have been asked by a few people to explain the steps I used to paint the Epic Pike and Shotte figures quite quickly.

Basically the process is:

Leave everything on the frame and undercoat it grey (both sides!) then heavily dry brush white  brushing downwards.

I have some sample Army Painter Speed paints I bought to try (out of professional curiosity) so I used a mix of those, ink washes and normal Coat D'arms paints.

1) Paint the main coat colour with a wash (I used Army painter Magic Blue for the first unit) - just splash it on and cover everything.  If the unit wasn't fully uniform in colour I would miss out a few figures here and paint their jackets or trousers when I painted the hats.

2) Paint the hats in various different shades of Brown, gray and black using washes again. 

I also painted all the shoes with either black or brown at this point, and I used two of the browns to paint the bags which are on some of the backs.

I used one of the browns to paint the bandoliers on the musketeers.

I also used the black to paint the sword hilts.

I also used one of the sandy browns to paint the gloves on the officers and pikemen

3) Paint the Muskets and pikes wood colour

4) Paint the musket rests a dark brown chestnut and paint any hair on the back of the figures.

5) Paint the straps buff

6) Paint the barrel of the muskets, plus swords, top of musket rests and pike points Chainmail silver

7) Paint the armour and helmets (I used army painter Broadsword silver which is fairly dark  -your could paint them chainmail first and then wash them).

8) paint the stockings, drum bits, collars and feathers white - could do hat bands but I didn't bother. I dabbed in the stockings at the front as you can't easily reach all of them.

9) Paint the flesh on faces and hands (I didn't bother painting beards).

10) Paint sashes Red

11) Paint gold on drum rim and anything on the officer that seems it needs it.

11) Touch up anything that really stands out - like white in the wrong place.

12) Remove from the sprue - touch up sides of arms where they were attached with coat colour. Glue on bases, varnish and when dry add flock to base and glue on flags.

DONE

The secret to speed is not worrying if everything is completely neat, as you are just aiming at the look of a whole unit viewed on the tabletop and also using a colour in more than one place -so muskets and pikes the same brown and using the same washes for some hats, bandoliers, bags, etc I did wonder if the figures would benefit from a thin black wash to separate the colours more but decided it wasn't worth that extra step and it would dull down the colours.

Hope that helps a bit.