Painting 'Praetorius'

I enjoyed painting Flosi so much, and I'm so pleased with the results that I decided to have a go at the old Citadel bard that I showed at the bottom of the post here.

I well remember my first bard character.  when we got the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook it included bards (amongst many other new options) so my friend Dave and myself each had a party made up of the new classes or class variants; druid, paladin, ranger, illusionist and bard. Newer players probably don't appreciate how hard it was to become a bard in those days; a character had to reach certain levels in several different classes first before becoming a bard (I think this included fighter, magic user and thief, correct me in the comments if you know better).  Mind you, the bard was pretty powerful.  Praetorius may not have been my first bard character mini, though he certainly dates from about this time.  His certainly my favourite bard mini from this era though, so he deserves a new paint job.

After stripping, Praetorius was given a coat of Vallejo White Surface Primer. The painting was straight forward, base coat, shade and highlight, with me attempting blending in some places.

I'm not listing each colour as I don't need to match his paint scheme in the future, and also I've been using my wet palette, so colour choice is often dictated by what's already on there, (and who knows what paint mixtures that might be).  I did make some changes as I was painting him; his off white linen shirt was originally pale green and his hose yellow. The green looked too much like a nylon shirt, so I reverted to off white and decided the hose looked better like that too.

"Out of tune you say?  Well is this sharp enough for you?"

Looking closely at the photographs I think a bit of lining might be in order, but I'll not rush , I'm happy with him as is.

This was another fun mini to paint. Much more detail than Flosi. The fancy clothing encouraged me to give him a fancy paint job, though I'm aware that I could have given him even more ornate slashed trousers. He rather reminds me of painting my Empire army many years ago, in fact that may have influenced my colour choice, as most of that army was Altdorf.  

The only thing that bothers me about the mini is the 'lute'.  As far as minis with musical instruments go, it's pretty good actually, I've seen some laughably bad attempts on some instruments.  For a lute, the peg box is wrong and the body is closer to a rebec. But don't mind me, it's just me being an Early Music geek.