Painting Spanish Tercios

If Spanish Tercios dominated the European battlefields for a century and a half, unfortunately the same is not the case with the wargame miniature market. Most of the existing companies that make figurines the Thirty Years War offer more or less generic ranges that inevitably cannot dedicate much detail to the peculiarities of each nation. Our range, on the other hand, is specifically documented and sculpted to represent soldiers of the Spanish Tercios, also inspired by the work of the superb contemporary painter Augusto Ferrer Dalmau and the photographer Jordi Bru. Even so, they could also be used to represent other armies of the period, especially others contingents of the Hispanic Monarchy. Such a specific range also requires equally specific colors. Here is my proposal for painting Spanish Tercios miniatures in 28 mm.

For this tutorial we will use different figures from the 1898 Miniaturas Spanish Tercios range for the Thirty Years’ War, Vallejo Model Color paints (three-digit numerical references, eg 863, for options of other brands, consult this color chart ) as well as primer spray of any brand (although I always recommend Citadel’s).

Firstly, although the 1898 Miniaturas’s figures come extremely clean of burrs, with our modeling knife we will clean all kinds of metal surpluses, and we will glue the swords with cyanoacrylate in their corresponding place. Regarding pikemen, it is up to you whether to glue the pike before painting, which can be annoying, or after, once painted (although we will have to be very careful with the glue). Finally, we will glue the miniature with cyanoacrylate on an empty paint bottle to handle the figure at will during the painting process without having to touch it, and we will prime the figure with a very thin layer of white or black spray, after which we will repaint brush with Black (950).

During the first half of the 17th century, there was no concept of military uniformity, except in some very specific cases, such as that of some Swedish regiments. In the Spanish case, the soldiers wore, almost universally, a buff coat (called “búfala”) or leather jacket (“coleto”), with or without sleeves, which served as protection, under which they used to wear a doublet (“jubón” o “doblete”), a jacket that in civilian life was worn over the shirt. The sleeves could be unbuttoned longitudinally, so it was common to wear them hanging on the back. Rarely would they be seen in shirt sleeves (in special operations such as “encamisadas”), since they were considered underwear. Breeches below the knee and stockings, and as footwear, shoe (more common in the first half of our period) or boot (which began to take effect gradually after 1630). Front ranks pikemen usually wore helmets and breastplates, preferably with tassels, while those in the rear ranks had to get along just with helmets, and sometimes not even that. As for the shoot, they carried a shoulder belt with the so-called twelve apostles, wooden containers with loads of gunpowder for their firearms. Arquebusiers sometimes used to cover themselves with helmets and even metal caps hidden under their hats, while among musketeers, the greater weight of their equipment (both the musket and the rest, essential to fire their heavy weapon) forced lightness and the hat was the universal garment. They all carried a sword hanging from their belts or shoulder belts, and some, in addition, the handy Biscayan (“Vizcaína”) dagger. Given the universality of the clothing, the soldiers of the different sides used to be distinguished by the color of the sashes, armbands, feathers, straps… red in the Spanish case, as well as the burgundy crosses that they embroidered on their coletos or on their hats. Regarding the colors of the clothing, brown, ochre and gray tones prevailed, although they are also seen in blue, green, red… but never bright colors, always soft tones that we will try to represent in our color palette.

We will paint with the traditional system of base color and two highlights, explained in other articles in this series, over a black base. That is, we must think of each surface to be painted (armor, buff, breeches, hands, face, etc.) as a “hermetic compartment”, delimited by the black of the primer, which we will use as lining.

On the color palette, this is a great opportunity to experiment with mixes. Although I understand the usefulness and efficacy of the standardized three-color systems already pre-established for base-first highlight-second highlight, those of you who already know me know that I adore mixtures, because they allow us to avoid standardization, individualize each figure and exploit the maximum our stock of paints. Because as we will see below, from an unique base color we can obtain very different finishes depending on what we mix it with, something that may not be as obvious as it seems. However, for this you have to distinguish between several families of browns (brown, reddish) and try to combine shades from the same family, information found in the charts of colors.

The recurrent use of the Iraqi Sand (819) can draw attention, the truth is that it is an useful sand color that allows to clarify almost any color (brown, green, even blue) in a fairly neutral way, without tending to the yellow of other sand colors or excessive white crushing. I also use a lot on the color charts Siena (113) from the Vallejo Art Deco range. It is a color that I use very regularly and if you have the Art Deco range at hand, I recommend you to get at least Siena (113), White (001) and Black (120), they are colors of much use and the greater capacity of these bottles (60 ml vs. 17 ml of Model Color) makes them very worthwhile. If this is not possible, Cork Brown (843) from the Model Color range would be its closest equivalent.

In the description of the step by step I will indicate percentages of each color in the mixtures, but they are extremely approximate and will always depend on the particular taste of each one due to a greater or lesser contrast between the three layers of color.

With this second pikeman we are going to continue exploring the range of browns and, especially, ochres.

The objective with this figure is to demonstrate what was said at the beginning, that very different shades can be obtained from the same base color, depending on what colors we mix it with to get the highlights.