Il Pane Carasau - the Golden Pikes

It's the Dogs of War again; the beauty of this army is that it allows me to play around with oddball units and wild colour schemes I wouldn't have use for anywhere else.  To date my Dogs of War have virtually every uniform colour: deep reds, lime greens, purples, pastels...  But no yellow.

There is a reason for this; the Vallejo yellows are, well it'd be unfair to say their not that good, they are no worse than any other acrylic I've tried; it's just I find yellow in general is not a great paint pigment.  Still I decided to press on, and therefore had to find a solution.  given I was painting over a black undercoat it was going to be a challenge.

I began with a mix of Vallejo Flat Yellow and my old favourite Cavalry Brown.  This was because the latter paint has a good strong, but not too dark pigment, and so would help support the yellow as a medium; I'm not going to say I was at all happy with the colour at this stage, but this was only meant as a base:

And yes, I had already done the metals, but I would touch those up later if needed.  The initial coverage was still less than perfect, but the aim was to get all the recesses covered not the the surfaces so much.

Next, more Yellow was added to the mix and overbrushed heavily over the base coat; the result of stage two is on the left in the photo below:

Far from satisfactory.  I didn't know how many coats it was going to take; so it was just a case of keeping going.  The figures above on the right have had a second coat of the same mix overbrushed on and are starting to show some graduation of highlighting.

Those two coats had not yet excised all the 'black' showing through, so a layer of pure Flat Yellow now had to be applied to the models.  This was drybrushed in some places and painted conventionally in others, where coverage was needed.  Slowly getting closer:

Left to dry, it still didn't look good enough, so another layer of Flat Yellow was added; and then a light selective drybrush of  Flat Yellow with a little beige added was applied to the top surfaces.  With SIX coats I was finally happy with the Yellow!

Of course there was still plenty to do, did I mention that it was a unit of 32; well it was, and I've said in the past I always doubt my sanity when undertaking to paint more than 24 figures of this scale at one time.  These had already tried to burn me out, and now I had to do any number of belts, boots, faces, pikes, etc.

Still once finished, I was more than satisfied with the resultant unit:

Finishing the detailing in a uniform range of deep browns with obvious red and blue accents really improved the look of the models.

Now to arrange a game for them and the several other new regiments recruited recently to the army of Focaccia.