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.