Horses

The next part of my Lord of the Rings project is to build and paint a box of Knights of Minas Tirith. It's been a long time since I've tried to paint a miniature of a horse, so I decided I'd start with those. I explained in an earlier post how I decided that I needed to do some green stuff on the backs of the horses. I'm glad I did because the finished product is much better as a result.

Painting the horses was a little more difficult than I'd hoped, but less so than I had feared. I started by block painting in the bodys, tails and manes. I decided to use two different color schemes for the bodies. This should result in the unit looking a bit more "natural" in that not all the horses are identical, but still keeps things easy for painting. I stayed away from doing any socks or other markings in order to keep things simple. I'll probably save those kinds of details for my character models in order to better distinguish them.

Before the wash, the lighter scheme looked like crap, but after the wash I think it's the better of the two, although I'm pleased with both. It's harder to distinguish the two schemes in the picture than it is in real life. The darker scheme is on the three horses to the right.

The rest of the scheme was pretty much dictated by the scheme I used on my Warriors of Minas Tirith. The saddle blankets were the same gray as the uniforms, and the leather accessories the same black as that on the armor straps. Finally, the small piece of armor on the heads of the horses was the same metallic color as the armor on the warriors.

The most difficult part of the process was the wash. On my smaller miniatures, this is the easiest part of the process, but there are two issued on the horses. The first is that I worked with two separate washes, brown for the bodys and black for the metal and cloth. I had to take reasonable care to keep the wash in the area it was intended for. The second, and bigger, problem was that with the larger flatter areas on the horses flanks and shoulders I had to take care that there wasn't pooling of the wash. One shoulder in particular was prone to a circular pooling that resulted in a very un-natural looking circular spot when the wash dried. It took me three tries to finally get it right. The upside to this was that I learned how to just paint over a portion of a washed miniature in order to re-wash just that portion.

It took two to three coats of wash to get to the final result, but I'm very pleased with that result, and am now looking forward to assembling and painting the riders.

Color Scheme #1
Body: Game Color 43 Beasty Brown
Mane & Tail: Game Color 45 Charred Brown

Color Scheme #2
Body: Game Color 42 Parasite Brown
Mane & Tail: Game Color 43 Beasty Brown

Saddle Blanket: Citadel Foundation Adeptus Battlegray
Armor: Game Color 53 Chainmail Silver
Leather touchups: Game Color 51 Chaos Black
Eyes: Game Color 51 Chaos Black
Grass: Citadel Foundation Orkhide Shade
Body Wash: Citadel Wash Devlan Mud cut with magic wash mix
Armor and Cloth Wash: Citadel Wash Bedab Black cut with magic wash mix