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I finally finished up the kangaroo dragoon mini I picked up from Red Panda at Gencon this year.

I recently started on a new historical piece (sorry to anyone checking out this thread in the hopes that I misspelled 'dragons'). It's a 54mm Napoleonic figure from Pegaso. He's an officer of the Empress' Dragoons. Since he's in his dress uniform, I wanted to come up with a scene that would be appropriate. A little while back I found this great photo etch gates from ScaleLink. It looked like the kind of gate you'd find in front of some old French chateau, so it was perfect for this piece. I built a column using juweela bricks and then used another piece of photo etch for a plaque on the column. Here's a look at the scene prior to painting... I started painting the face. A few of the minor features are done purely through painting (rather than sculpted on). These would be the cleft in the chin (it's a large chin, so a bit more detail is nice) and the scrunched up skin where the helmet strap goes under his chin. Just a bit of highlighting and shading is all it needed to create the effect. Speaking of highlighting and shading, I thought this image does a nice job of showing what has been painted on and what's just room lights. On the left, I'd painted the face and collar, but the rest of the coat, shirt, and pants are just a uniform base shade. On the right, I've gone in and shaded all of those elements. And here are some more images of the figure as it currently stands. Still need to do the braided details on his shoulders and around his right arm, then the gloves, helmet, boots, and sword/scabbard (yet to be attached). One challenge with this piece was trying to get the dark green coat to look right. If you've ever tried to do a dark green or a dark blue, you may find that as you start to highlight all of a sudden that dark color turns into a medium or even a light shade of the color. To help stop this, I used medium or even a light grey mixed in with the dark green to create my highlights. This desaturates the highlights and helps the piece retain the dark color look even with high contrast. Of course it also helps to limit the area in which the highlights are applied.