Back in the Saddle Again!

Almost a week passed since I’ve last had much time to touch my models for the “Tale of Four Gamers.” The world lost two very good men last week and that took precedence over a little paint and plastic, but now things are turning back to normal and it was time to get back in the ‘saddle’ and at least get some horses finished up for my Empire army. I had hoped to have the horses and their respective knights finished by this point, but my plans haven’t come together. Thankfully, two good days of time and I have nine fully painted and based horses and most of the work done on my Captain.
Assembly is complete on the first seventeen models. The first set of knights and their horses are pinned, with the knights primed in black. I didn’t do the best job of lining up the pins and may need to fix a few saddles, but I did manage to come up with a method during the last few knights. Some sit slightly crooked in the saddle, but this can be fixed at some point. Hopefully, the last eight knights will be quicker for this process, but I ran out of paper clips. Assembly was pretty easy, but I did do a few conversions on the second batch of knights and used some heads from the cannon team to give them a little character. Veterans always have beards and no helmets, right?

The big win during the first period of work was fully completing the nine horses. The light bay horses turned out to look great and I’m really happy with those and the two dark bay horses. The two black horses look alright, as does the dark gray. The dapple gray and white horses leave a little to be desired and I’m not too pleased with the gradients or look of the white horse, but I’m not sure what can easily be done to make me happy with him. This was my first batch of horses and between painting their skin and then the blue and gold livery, each horse probably took between two and three hours. Painful, but after being based, I’m fairly pleased with them.

The heraldry for the captain was my biggest issue during the first ‘two’ weeks of work. I had initially wanted to give him a lot of checkered patterns, but after doing one side in blue and gold checkers, I liked the look, but felt it was very busy and painting the whole model in this pattern would have been a bit much. I ended up redoing some of the work on the one side and decided to make the ‘harder’ to paint side white, with a small pattern along the bottom and then split the shield between white and checkered. This matched up with the white horse that I’m still not pleased with. I used three colors of ‘silver’ and washed the armor with Badab Black, leaving only the gold highlights and his helm and sword to complete his painting. This will be first priority when I get back from New York City.

After I return from a little mini vacation, the Vinkel’s Woods knights are going to face either some Lizardmen or Vampire Counts for a small skirmish. This will be the first action for these units and I am curious to see how everything is going to go. I still feel like I’m being mean spirited in using nine cavalry units with a good armor save. It’s going to be rough to finish painting sixteen knights and eight horses over the next two weeks, but I’m going to see if I can’t get at least the knights and horses done. My math was a little off and this is more like painting thirty four miniatures instead of seventeen. One thing is for sure, I’m not the world’s fastest painter and each of the thirty four miniatures will average about two hours to paint, and perhaps upwards of three.

The Horse Show!

It has been all about the horses the past week and aside from assembling the models I needed for the first month of “Tale of Four Gamers,” I’ve been painting nine armored horses. I’ve never painted a horse before and have to admit to not being a large fan of the 1991 Games Workshop sculpts that are still being used for the Empire Knightly Orders. Still, they need to be painted and I figured I might as well start on the largest subset of my first 500 points and these nine steeds represented that. The Knights themselves shouldn’t be as bad aside from their feather plumes and the next round of horses will be one smaller in number and I will have a little more knowledge in two weeks when I start that batch.

With no experience and no real starting point, I researched Al Gore’s Internet and discovered that Games Workshop has an excellent guide on their website. Written by Adam Troke, “How to Paint Horses” gives a brief overview of the physiology of a horse and a little background on how markings were used to identify horses. It then offers a wonderful color guide to paint the horses using various GW paints, foundation paints and washes. Out of my eight Knightly Orders, I decided to paint two light bay, two dark bay, two black, one dapple gray, one dark gray and give the Captain a white horse. This provided my army with four of the more familiar brown horses and offered a little color and variety.

I enjoy the bay horses more than the others and feel they look the best. The black horses do not look all that bad and I’ll be curious to see how the white one turns out when all other painting is complete. I’m not a fan of the dark gray and have mixed feelings on the dapple. These were my first eight horses and I’m happy that I decided to paint the armored ones before the pistoliers as my experience will pay off by the time I finally get around to painting a complete horse. I have gained a deeper appreciation for the washes and they definitely aided the blending of the layered musculature and highlighting. My favorite light bay earned himself two white fetlocks.

The livery will be themed upon the Blue Raiders and from looking through the Empire book I found a design that I really liked. It’s not going to be the most original, but I think it will look splendid with my army. The eight horses that belong to the Knightly Orders will all get a blue and gold motif that will be reversed or changed for the second eight. This first batch will be mostly blue and I will throw in some minor differences to a few horses to allow them to be different. The Precipitor’s horse will get a little more outlandish livery than the other horses, but I don’t plan on it being too drastically different.

The most difficult task of this first round has been the white horse of the Captain. White is such a royal pain in the arse to paint to begin with. I used a gray foundation base coat over the black primer and then painted the horse with a couple of coats of Skull White. I tried to get the paint to look even and not chalky and mostly succeeded. After painting large white surfaces on an Ultramarine Drop Pod, you would have thought I’d learned my lesson. Then a wash of Skull White mixed with Fortress Gray gave the horse some shading. Touched up with Skull White for highlighting, the horse was mostly finished. For the livery, I will be painting a bronze and gold pattern over the armor and I hope it turns out to look cool.

With losing time to real life and also assembling the other band of Knightly Orders, the livery painting will be moved into next week and I hope to make up the time as soon as possible.

The Empire Rises!

I have exactly one model painted for my Empire army. For boredom sake, I previously painted a Cannon Team in my high school colors. The blue and gold of the Middletown Blue Raiders looked quite spiffy on the Empire model and was my start towards the Warhammer Fantasy army that I intended to use as my chosen army. My entry into WHFB was from a sizable Orc & Goblin army given to me from some friends. I ended up throwing a little cash towards it as I felt it was too much to give to me, but had I chosen an army to begin with, it would have been Empire.

Time has passed and I've picked up a few models towards expanding my army and have played exactly one game. It is time to actually get serious about my Empire army and the opportunity to do so has been provided by my friend Rich from the Adventurer's Guild. He is running a "Tale of Four Gamers" campaign for the store. The original choice for this was to be my Ultramarines, but I have a little over a dozen models painted for that army and everybody else is doing 40K, so going the WHFB route seemed a little original. After purchasing a few more models, I'm ready to begin assembling and painting the first 500 points.

More on that later, but hello and please check back on my little corner of the web to see how this project is going along. If you have a few extra minutes, please check out Rich's incredibly work on his BlogSpot page at http://bossmansbitzbox.blogspot.com .