Back to the Brush and Baize

Lockdown found me returning to some of my old hobbies that pressure of work had forced me to shelve a while ago. I have never been a keen football fan in general but I was really starting to miss the odd trip to the Town Ground to see Heanor Town play. A decent pint, a tray of chips & peas, a good chat with whoever is around and some passable football, all for not much more than a tenner, is a fantastic way to spend a Saturday afternoon. 

This hankering led me to my stalled projects box where I found several unpainted table football teams made by Santiago Table Soccer. I had originally intended to paint up all the teams from the League One 1971-72 season but had only got as far as Derby, Forest and Wolves with about half a Manchester City team and a single Blackburn Rovers player. I put something good on the radio, selected may paints and set to once more. This time I am broadening the definition somewhat to the most iconic kits from 1968-ish to 1972-ish and extending to Italy and maybe The Netherlands for some of the more colourful kits. Fiorentina, Palermo, Ajax and ADO are certainly ones I would like to own.

I bought a vintage team from Santiago, intending to paint up Newton Heath so I had a set of green bases and yellow discs after deciding against painting 1892 teams just yet. Naturally I wanted to mark my return to painting with a splash of colour and what could be more colourful than Norwich City.

The paints used were:

Hair - Rhinox Hide (Citadel Base)

Skin - 955 Flat Flesh (Vallejo Model Color)

Yellow - 953 Flat Yellow (Vallejo Model Color)

Green - Warboss Green (Citadel Layer)

Boots - 950 Black (Vallejo Model Color)

Yellow Stripes - 951 White (Vallejo Model Color) overpainted with flat yellow.

Keeper's Jersey - 968 Flat Green (Vallejo Model Color)

The figure was primed white and the flesh painted neatly around the areas to be painted yellow. No need to be neat around the shorts as green paints over both the yellow and flesh. Two coats of yellow were needed before painting two thin coats of green on the shorts and the details. I then erased the mistakes with white and painted a broad white stripe along the sides of the shorts. The white was then over-painted with yellow again, white for opacity and yellow for colour. I painted a thin green stripe down the centre of the broad, now yellow, stripe on the shorts to achieve the distinctive double yellow stripe. Hair, boots and badge were painted and then two coats of acrylic gloss varnish toughened the whole paint-job to playable levels. I was going to spray them with matt varnish but the humidity would have frosted them. Now that I have had them around in gloss for a while I find that I prefer the shiny look and I am going to do them all this way. A nice team box from Subbuteo World finished off my first team in this project and signaled my return to the sub-beautiful game.