The Dogs - Spring Clean Challenge 2026

I’ve finished the army general, La Lionne Rousse and the command stand that features her sister and the army standard.

La Lionne Rousse is a Confrontation miniature from the first releases for the game by Rackham.  In line with the French design aesthetic her armour accentuates her assets in a very unbattleworthy way but I’ve painted her as she was intended to look by the designer.  The sculpting on the mounted miniature particularly is absolutely flawless, probably the best hand sculpted miniature I own.

I didn’t paint with the box art in front of me.  I’m neither a good enough painter to get close to that quality nor is that necessary for this army.  I wanted her to look nice and to try to match the image in my head which was with much redder/coppery bronze metallic armour, rather than the brown that the studio went for.  She is supposed to be the Red Lioness after all.

Base Coats

I went for Talos Bronze Speedpaint for the armour, Peachy Flesh for the skin and one of the Blanche Speedpaints, Blood Moon for the loincloth.  The hair is a blend of a drop of that red, Sand Golem and Bony Matter with some medium added and the colours barely mixed together to give a variety of colours and depth of tones.  The horse was painted with a mixture of Hardened Leather and Ruddy Fur again with some medium added.  Leatherwork was Satchel Brown.  Gold elements were undercoated with Hoplite Bronze.  The sword was undercoated with Enchanted Steel.  At this point everything got a coat of matt varnish.

Highlights

Each colour was highlighted with at least two colours or blends used, sometimes three.  This sounds timeconsuming but I tend to put all the colours on the palette at once and then work quickly starting with a deeper tone in the recesses and then moving to the highlight tone and then possibly swapping back or blending the two to tint or change an area of midtone.  Speedpaints can be a bit uneven and the dried colour isn’t always the same on the model as it looks on the palette or on a test patch.

This was the case with the red.  It went on nicely and looked exactly right but when it dried it had an orangey edge that I didn’t like.  I therefore tackled it with Flat Red and Vermilion acrylics.  The Flat Red was thinned and used in the recesses where a very dark brown had formed when the Speedpaint pooled.  I then switched to Vermilion for the highlight areas, changing the tone of the upper highlights from a pale orange to a brighter red.  Then some swapping between the two with some mixing to help blend out some sharp looking transitions and add a clearer red colour.  Overall there is probably about 60% of the original Speedpaint showing with the remainder either tinted with thin glazes or painted over completely.

Similar work went into the armour with a range of metallic paints from Darkstar, AP and Vallejo.  The top highlights always had Vallejo Metal in them as these give the brightest highlights.  A blend of Copper, Gold and Pale Burnt Metal were used at various points.  I have tried to vary the metal colour and tone to give the piece more visual interest.

The sword blade had Vallejo Metal Steel painted onto the lower half, Darkstar Baroque on the upper half and then Vallejo Pale Burnt Metal edge highlighted onto the upper half.  The application was quite thin to allow some of the light and shadow from the Speedpaint basecoat to show through.

Here she is:

The foot version was painted at the same time using the same techniques.  As you can see I even did the eyes.  They are character models after all but the subtle sculpting didn’t help at all.

The standard suffers from being very thick because it is a resin cast piece being early Titan Forge.  I love the detail on the banner so am prepared to put up with its rather clunky design.  I painted the field black to try to hide this a bit.  The standard bearer has ‘blued’ armour which was done using the technique shown for the Firstbord Iron Guard regiment earlier.

On the home straight now.  I’ve got the Ice Queen and then Leopold’s Leopard Company left and I’m done.  I was also working on the army supplement today.  I’ve got about half of it written and all of the unit stats were transferred out of Excel.  Should get it done on time too.