Fish Warrior

28mm Fish Warrior

This is part of a small commission of 28mm fantasy figures. My customer wanted sea blue and green armour clothing, with a blue helmet, metal trident, and a shield made from shell.

Building up from a black base I blocked in  the rear skirt, gloves and webbed bits in  mid green then applied highlights and washes of dark grown to tone down. Antique gold  was applied to the scale armour , then ink washed in dark blue and yellow sepia and rubbed back to gold with a cotton bud.

The skirt fronts were blocked in dark grey and a brown wash, after looking at some colour combinations on cichlids, along with an orange edge to add a little interest.

I mixed a greenish blue for the armour on helmet,chest and shoulders, then dry-brushed highlights. I used  a sepia yellow wash to add to the greenish tone and brown washes to give more shadow. Teeth, lure and the face covering were worked up from yellow ochre to off white. Belts and straps were red leather brown from vallejo. There was a small cylindrical object in the belt which I painted as a bone cartouche.


The helmet was spotted with yellow ochre to break up the blue and to outline the eyes and nostrils. I didn't think a completely shell shield would work, so the reverse was painted as bleached wood.

I had the most fun with the shield - looking up images of iridescence, I was tring to capture the   yellows,blues, pinks and purplish colours that are refracted by mica. I started with a green base for the shield to provide shadow and then  some thin layers of white, for an uneven , translucent look. various shades of yellow ochre,  corn blue and pale burgundy were dry brushed on to the  surface, followed by more layers of white to get the patchy patina of a mica surface. 

The sides of the robe were shaded from light blue to deep purple to frame the gold scale armour and to balance out the light shades at the top of the figure.

A  gilt  bronze  plate set with white shells was washed with green intended to reflect the effects of corrosion on bronze, likewise the steel trident was  given  thick layers of rust lightening from dark brown to  orange, dry brushed in steel and silver, with a final brown wash to tone it all down.