Monday, May 19, 2014

First sighting of the Royalist Horse - WIP

It's been a long time coming but finally made a start on the Royalist cavalry. I have been buying the cavalry (mainly Perry Miniatures) in dribs and drabs over the last few years, so after one last Perry top-up order arrived from thewarstore.com I finally sat down to prep the models last week. 


Several nights were spent clipping, carving, scraping, filing and gluing to get over 70 cavalry models ready for priming, and by the time this lot were done my fingers felt like they had been in a mincer. This is the least favorite part of the hobby for me, and I have decided that I most definitely prefer building plastic models to prepping metals.


The tray on the left above is all the Gordon Horse required for Auldearn. At 1:10 figure scale I need 2 units of 20 to represent the 400 Gordons that fought at Auldearn on the tabletop. The right hand tray is a large unit of Scots lancers, which will allow me to field one of the Gordon units with lance, and have lancers as an option for our other games. The remaining models are mounted commanders and hangers on for command bases.

This is a pretty daunting painting prospect, but I have taken some advice from Roy who has finished the Covenanter Horse and gave me the benefit of his experience. So these models will be painted in batches of ten to a dozen at a time. Each batch will be a single horse colour and I will work through the following colours (using the relevant Foundry paint triads)...
  • Black
  • Grey-white
  • Dark Bay
  • Light Bay
  • Chestnut
The remaining 10 will be a mix of more exotic horse colours including...
  • Couple of Palominos
  • A grey dapple or two
  • Roans of various hues
  • Maybe a patchy piebald or two for fun
Once the horses are painted I will take care of the riders, with plenty of buff coats and hodden grey. And the best part - only a couple of plaids!

More updates to follow...

1 comment:

Millsy said...

Sounds like a plan. I painted a pile of Royalist horse just recently and it was something of a trial to be sure. The result is well worth the effort though.

Good to see you not painting every horse the same colour. I understand why people do but I prefer the other option by far.