“A Horse of a Different Colour” is nine parts long, and goes into fascinating detail about how horses get the colours they do, as well as how to paint the beasts! Part One is an introduction; Part Two talks about markings, white and otherwise, and oddities like the “bloody-shouldered grey” horse. The whole series can be found in reverse order under the horse of a different colour tag over at Trouble. Finally Part Nine is entirely on painting horses, using the stuff discussed previously to get good, interesting horses.
And yes, my renewed interest in painting horseflesh is because there’s more RCW Cossacks on the painting table, as well as a unit of Cuirassiers for my long-neglected English Civil War/Thirty Year’s War army!
So I promised to run a Russian Civil War game at a friend’s place on the Nov. 11th long weekend; I made the promise ages ago and suddenly looked at a calendar and realized that’s about two weeks away… and it’s been months since I’ve touched a paintbrush or even looked at most of my RCW stuff!
So this weekend it’s cracking on with the half-finished 20 or so mixed infantry, another dozen Red sailors, and the finishing touches on the mostly-painted cavalry force. I’ve also got an assembled field gun I might try and get painted and based, just to add variety and give whoever doesn’t get the armoured car in our game a weapon capable of actually killing the thing!
Right, fresh water in the pot, clear the crap off the painting desk… amazing how an underused space attracts random junk, isn’t it?
I’ve had a bit of a slowdown in painting and general wargaming involvement lately; partly this is because I haven’t had a game of anything in ages, and partly it’s been down to my painting bench being a horrifying clutter of finished models, scrap and offcuts left over from scenery projects, real-life clutter like spare sunglasses, and general disarray… so this evening I sat down to get it all sorted out.
The finished figures went into cases finally, then I cleared one section of the desk at a time, ruthlessly threw away all the garbage (even most of the offcut bits that “might be useful one day”..) and imposed some order on the place.
My painting and scenery desk, cleaner and more organized than it's been in ages!
A quick tour, from the left rear corner… the black caps are FW & Rowney artist’s acrylic inks, the white caps are my ever-growing Reaper Master Series paint collection, and there’s a random assortment of GW, old Ral Partha and other paints in the gap between the inks and the Reaper paints. The good paintbrushes live in the old superglue bottle at centre, with the new superglue lurking behind. The round white cookie tin is the tin of tools – Xacto knives, needle files, old beaten up paintbrushes, tweezers, and on and on. Finally in the back right, that small box has spare Xacto blades, putty, glues and other tools.
Front left has my painting swatches (very useful strips of white card with small rectangles of most of the colours I own painted on and labelled), scrap paper to take notes on paint schemes, then the random assortment of miniatures around the cutting mat that give this post it’s title. There’s a Reaper dragon, Russian Civil War Cossacks from both Copplestone and Brigade, some Copplestone cavemen, four Pulp Figures deck guns, and a few random figures just to round out the collection. On the right is my painting palette (a used CD) and a folded paper towel to wipe brushes on.
I’ve decided that one of this summer’s projects is going to have to be a shelf set of some kind to go at the back of my painting desk and give me space to better organize the paints and other stuff. Hopefully a cleaned up and reorganized painting area will get me applying the brush to miniatures again, I’d like to finish the Cossack cavalry in the next couple of weeks for a mid-June RCW game!
As I predicted when I linked to it, the very nice Games Workshop tutorial on painting horses has vanished from their website, which is a shame. Thankfully, there’s other good resources out there for horse colours and markings.
Via Wikipedia, a useful little graphic of the stripes, blazes and other markings horses can have on their heads. A scattering of this sort of thing amongst your cavalry really adds character.
First of all, Wikipedia’s very useful article on Horse Markings has great diagrams of the variety of face, leg and body marks horses can have, and the Equine Coat Colourarticle, while not as nice as the markings one, at least has some good pictures of varieties of horse colour.
Missing Links? Yeti? Sasquatch? Some other sort of yet-undiscovered ape-man? The result of Mad Science? Any or all of the above?
Hairy Apemen from Pulp Figures & Uncle Mike
The two big guys are from Pulp Figures, PLT-7 Hairy Hominids, the two smaller figures are from Uncle Mike’s Strange Aeons line, the Missing Links. They’re all on bases I constructed of pennies and milliput, as usual.
Left to right, we have Momma (holding a skull), Pops, Junior (in the background, mugging for the camera) and finally Uncle Fred. I might yet do one last round of highlighting on their hair, and the bases do need a bit more work, but they’re playable as is. Not sure when they’ll get their first outing to terrify explorers or hapless cavemen, but hopefully soon!
Just a pair of painting tutorials today, linked to mostly so I can find them again when I need to refer to them!
Coll Mini Or Not (CMON) has a huge list of tutorials, contributed by users so they’re of variable quality and usefulness. One of the best is this well-illustrated look at ethnic skintones. Painting skin is something I’ve never found easy to do well, and even those I don’t use the Vallejo paints referred to in this article I still found it valuable. The index to their Articles section is here, a whole mix of stuff well worth checking out.
Games Workshop have a great horse painting tutorial, with a good primer on horse anatomy and colours as well as painting tips. I’m no fan of GW’s business practices, nor of most of their sculpts, but their technique has always been top-notch and they write a good tutorial, so credit where due. They also completely rebuild their own website every year or so, so this link might not be as stable as it ought to be…
There’s 43 Bolsheviks off my painting table and ready for action, finally! One Maxim MG crew, some officers and NCOs and a whole lot of ragged, barely uniformed riflemen. Almost entirely Copplestone figures, and I mixed freely from the regular rifles, greatcoated rifles and the partisan packs to get a suitable ragged look. I had just started painting (and thinking about organization) when this marvelous Lead Adventure thread opened, with all sorts of great contemporary photographs of both Red and White uniforms.
A Russian Civil War Bolshevik infantry force, finally marching off the painting table
24 more Bolshies to finish basing and then paint, at which point it’s on to the 60-some White Russians that are in the mail to me as I write this. All that painting will give me the core of two good-sized RCW infantry forces, nominally configured as platoon-sized forces for Through the Mud and the Blood but obviously configurable for other games as needed.
The Russian Civil War has well and truly taken over my painting schedule, and starting in November I should even be able to get some games in again, as a screwy work schedule settles somewhat and once again frees up my Sundays for gaming, which is of course the best possible use of that day. I’ll probably try to push hard to get enough Whites finished for a first Mud & Blood RCW outing by the last Sunday in November… we shall see!
(More photos of the Reds in the next few days, as daylight and weather allows…)
Here, have a werewolf. This big hairy brute is from the Strange Aeons miniatures of Uncle Mike. He’s a monster in several senses, about 44mm from base to top of his hairy head; the base is just under 40mm across.
I generally do figure prep (taking off moldlines and flash) and basic basing in fairly large batches, prime the whole batch, then tuck most of them away and bring them back out 5-10 at a time for painting.
It’s a good system for me; it gets the gruntwork of cleaning and prepping done efficiently, but avoids the “Primered Legions” paralysis I get from having hordes of unpainted figures staring at me from the corners of my painting bench. Instead they’re out of sight in in a spare figure case, to be brought out in small enough batches to actually paint.
An entire week since my last substantial post! The horror, how will our dedicated readership cope?
I’ve been painting up an English Civil War/Thirty Years War storm this week, filling that inevitable post-Lead Painters League void with 40-odd plastic pike-and-shotte foot and a dozen horse. You all saw 5 of the horse in one of my LPL entries, of course, the rest are taking shape nicely and all of the foot now have most of their basic paint on them. Sunday the 29th we’re running a 1000pt Field of Glory: Renaissance big battle, and I’m breaking one of my long-standing rules by fielding figures that aren’t even anywhere near finished just to get something on the table. At least they’re not straight-up Primered Legions — there are depths to which I will not stoop.
No pictures of my WiP paintjobs, but I’ll take the camera to tomorrow’s big game and try to get some reasonable shots to share here.
The Lead Adventure Forum is, of course, one of the greatest collections of creative wargaming minds I’m aware of. A random sampling of current coolness there that should be more widely known: Chicken Race on the Arumbaya, in which the estimable Hammers plans a pulpish steamboat race with a South American feel and some great-looking boats. Also, Boggler’s converted Improvised Back-of-Beyond Armoured Truck, very nice conversions of diecast toy trucks.
Elsewhere on the web (elseweb?) An Evil Giraffe has done his own versions of my riverbank pieces, and very nice they are too. He used broken cork sheet for his banks, so it has more texture (but also more height) than mine.
Finally, also via LAF but worthy of being mentioned on it’s own, Sarissa Precision have started selling a very, very nice looking line of 28mm laser-cut and -etched urban buildings that are perfect for pulp! Information here on the Sarissa site, and on sale here in their online store. I can’t wait to have some spare money to throw Sarissa’s way, the buildings are a good size (6″x4″ or 8″x6″ footprints and stackable for extra floors) and a fair price with enough detail to be interesting but not too fussy that they’re impractical. Hopefully at some point they offer their windows, doors and other details seperately, or even just the building fronts for those of us comfortable cutting our own side and rear walls.
Photos tomorrow or Monday of the ECW/TYW big-game madness, I promise!
