The Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge

Welcome to the Painting Challenge. Here you will find the fabulous, fevered work of miniature painters from around the world. While participants come from every ethnicity, gender, age and nationality, they have three things in common: they love miniatures, they enjoy a supportive community, and they want to set themselves against the Challenge. This site features the current year's event along with the archives of past Painting Challenges. Enjoy your visit and remember to come back soon.

Thursday, 3 February 2022

From SamuliS: 71st Beetroot Zouaves (61 points)

My next unit for Turnip28 is ready and this time it's a slightly bigger one with a unit of Fodder, or basic infantry, in the game. These will form the rank and file of my regiment the 71st Beetroot Zouaves.

I was trying to think about a suitable root vegetable for my forces to worship and in the end decided on beetroot as it matched the red pants of the units and seems to be quite a divisive vegetable which doesn't really seem to have much middle ground. Either it seems people hate it or love it. Part of it probably has to do with how it's generally served here in Finland. You get exposed to it as some cold grated salad side in school or then it's served during christmas as a weird salad of cold potatoes, beetroot and carrots that is covered with a beetroot flavored whipped cream. I used to hate it as a kid, but growing older I've actually taken a liking to beetroot especially in soups, stews etc.

This time the conversions were a bit more involved with the legs of Zouaves used with 3D printed armored bodies and a mix of Zouave and Afgan Tribesmen parts for the rest. The armor sculpts are from the official Turnip28 patreon site, but are freely available to anyone. Really amazing and characterful sculpts and sized to fit Perry sculpts perfectly. Again painted with contrast paints over a Sepia shaded zenithal and then additional depth and weathering done with oil paints and enamel mud effects.

I wanted to have a full command team for my unit with a sword armed officer, drummer and flag bearer. Not surprisingly there aren't too many beetroot themed wargaming flags available so I ended up painting one myself. I did a quick sketch of the outlines with a pencil and then painted it with super thinned down inks to have sort of a watercolour style. In the end quite fast and easy to do with plenty of control coming from doing it in multiple thin layers to vary shading in different areas. The two sides didn't come out exactly identical, but doesn't really matter as you'll never see them at the same time ;) When the basic colours were down I just framed the details with a dark brown ink line and then made it look a bit dirtier with brownish splatters.