Paint Recipe | Spanish Navy

I’m moving through all of the major nations present in Black Seas, and now it’s the turn of the Spanish. I have painted a Spanish ship before, a large merchant vessel, but it’s not the “official” scheme used by Warlord Games to denote our Iberian friends. I use official loosely, as there weren’t really standardized paint schemes in this timeframe, more like pick a color out of this pot, and it was almost always a variation of yellow it seems. Regardless, here’s the red version.

On the website, Warlord lists the red used as Army Painter Dragon Red. I like this color, but I think it’s a bit too bright. It makes the ship look slightly cartoonish, at least in my eyes. I also prime in a light grey color, so it made that bright red pop even more. Instead, I undercoated with AP Chaos Red, a perennial favorite here on Space Dinosaur minis. This was also used for the inside hull and mastheads, and will be my standard for Spanish warships to tie the fleet together. 

Once the Chaos Red dried, I diluted the Dragon Red with water ever so slightly. You want it to be able to glide and be a bit translucent, but not so much that it has no coverage or only fills the recesses with a bunch of watery paint. Paint over the Chaos Red while trying to stay on the raised edges as much as possible. This gets you contrast without having to do a wash, as I didn’t like the look of a pure Dragon Red washed with red tone. This gets you a more subtle look in my opinion. 

Unusually for brigs, I painted the bow railing a white to stand out from the rest of the ship. This is GW Pallid Wych Flesh, which I also used for the furled sails. The deck is AP Desert Yellow washed with Soft Tone. The gun carriages and deck details are GW Contrast Wyldwood, which was super nice for this kind of work. The black is the standard AP Matt Black, and at the rate all of these ships used black I’m going to run out soon. 

-The Space Dinosaur