SWAT all Painted

Well I have finished my SWAT team. There are 8 miniatures in all, 4 from the USX Range by RAFM (the taller miniatures) and the other 4 from West Wind's Road Kill range. In my mind the USX are nicer sculpts but are at least 32mm scale and although it isn't a massive issue you can tell without having o look too hard. My main issue with the West Wind miniatures is the faces which are not very well sculpted and it looks like the sculptor has given up on a couple of miniatures and just stuck Aviator Sunglasses on to cover the issue. That said, the one miniature with the goggles (not night vision) above his head has a very well sculpted face and is possibly my favorite miniature of all of them, one of the others looks simply comical with an over sized helemt that he can't possibly see under. Whilst I like slightly comic miniatures (esp GW and Privateer Press Goblins) I don't think it is really the right feel for SWAT, where it might fit better in a militia or young terrorist/freedom fighters.

On to the Painting:
This has to be one of the fastest paint jobs I have ever done.

A solid black primer, done more thoroughly than I usually do so I didn't need to worry about painting the black.

In order to do the bases, I simply used thick white and yellow paint (from the Vallejo Game Colour range) to make road markings (I used UK road markings because despite being SWAT I am most likely to use them in a UK setting as Armed Police), this gave the miniatures a bit of character and also served to hide the slotta sections. I then neatened up the lines with some black (for these miniatures I switched between VGC Negro Black and GW Chaos Black and they seem to match very well).

Next stop was to go online and double check the colour scheme both in photos and from the great Neil Shuck's site http://www.meeplesandminiatures.co.uk where he has a painting guide of his own for SWAT (and other modern troops). UK Armed Police are all black but SWAT wear a dark blue jacket under their kevlar vests. Having a miniature 99% black is going to look a little half-arsed at the best of times so I went with the SWAT colors (I mean who is gonna notice anyway). So I started with GW Foundation Leviathan Purple on the areas of blue, then a layer of GW Midnight Blue, then GW Regal Blue... This was my mistake as I started with purple I had to fight to bring down the red tint and the inexplicable metallic tint that the GW Midnight Blue seemed to add. In future I will use GW Regal Blue over GWF Mordian Blue

For the skin tones I wanted to have a mix of races and for the first time I attempted to do a slightly Asian look on my afforementioned favorite West Wind model. The caucasian models had my standard colour scheme of GWF Tallarn Flesh, GWW Ogryn Flesh and Highlights of GW Elf Flesh.
The Black troops are GW Dark Flesh over GWF Calthan Brown with a GW Chestnut Ink as a was and no highlights.
The Asian trooper didn't work out as well as I'd hoped, I used GWF Khemri Brown, GW Chestnut Ink, Bronzed Flesh highlights and then a final wash of GWW Ogryn Flesh.

There are very few details that needed doing as SWAT equipement is almost entirely black so I only did a quick coat of GW Bestial Brown for the shotgun grips. The Night Vision goggles have GW Scorpion Green lenses and all other eye pieces including the goggles, gas mask eyes and sunglasses are GW Regal Blue with GW Enchanted Blue and GW Skull White for the light glint.

The eyes are just GW Skull White with GW Chaos Black dots, for the first time I used a magnifying lens to do these and it really helps see the detail although depth perception through a magnifying lense is really hard to guage.

Highlighting was the last stage, for the black I used GW Fortress Grey and GW Enchanted Blue for the tunics.

Raggy, signing out