Painting the PLA

I've finally got brave enough to apply some paint to the first of my Empress modern PLA, that I got through Kickstarter.

Since I'm mainly planning to use these for urban engagements, it seemed to make most sense to use the Type 07 general camo pattern, since I'd expect the PLA to be using this, you know, "generally" and it looks a bit urban-y:

Urban-y is definitely a legitimate word.

So, as much for my own reference (once I forget what colours I used) as anything else, here's how I've painted my test model so far.

I started with a black undercoat. I applied this by hand rather than using a spray, mainly because the weather was terrible and I didn't want to go out to the garage to get the spray paint.

Next, the base coat for the camo. Looking at all the pictures I could find, this seems to be a grey with a touch of green with it. I wanted to use paints without mixing for all the basic colours, so I can easily get matches later on, so I did a bit of experimenting and settled on Vallejo Light Green Blue.

Next layer is a green, so some more trials on other models lying around my paint table suggested that German Fieldgrey WWII is the way to go. I tried to build up the pixellated effect by painting areas built up from horizontal and vertical lines.

Next is a greeny-brown colour, the closest match I could find was Brown Violet.

There's a small amount of dark grey in the pattern, which I'm using German Grey for. I use a lot of German Grey, it's a nice highlight for black stuff.

Then I filled in the flesh on the face, painted the gloves, and highlighted the rifle and boots. I like to put a fairly bright highlight on modern weapons, as most of the photos of them I've seen have them painted black, with bare metal on the edges where the paint wears away.

A brown wash dulls down the camo a little.

So, I'm nearly there. This has taken a while as I'm testing every stage to make sure it looks right to me, but once I have everything worked out I should be able to get through them pretty quickly. The last stages I'm expecting to do here are a light drybrush in the base colour to make the camo look a little worn, possibly with a layer of highlight on top of that. Then it's just the base and I'm done!