Tutorial: Painting Horses, 28mm

Continuing on with some Middle-earth figures this week...and I thought it might be a good idea to publish a step-by-step for painting horses for those who are interested in the subject.

So, starting out with the Valiant Rohirrim box...

We find that there are 18 cavalry figures in here. But only two different horse sculpts. What!?! So I'm going to end up with 9 horses with heads up and 9 horses with heads down. That's ridiculous. Now, having said that, the horse sculpts you do get are excellent. They are two very beautiful models.

I'm painting these guys up for my Middle-earth game, so I thought I'd go to the internet to get some source material. Looking at Hasufel, the Chestnut ridden by Aragorn in this pic, and Arod, the Grey ridden by Legolas, I decided to use these two for the inspiration for the pair of models I was going to do for this tutorial.

Another Grey. This one is Snowmane...Theodin's horse.

And Aragorn on Hasufel again.

There are a number of color variations for Chestnuts and Greys (as well as any other type of horse), so I used a couple of other photos for guidelines. Another Grey here. Notice the dark legs and nose.

And a Chestnut glamor shot. I liked this one because it showed off some nice white socks.

Well, with source material sorted out, I started into contruction. These are just two-piece figures, and they went together without any trouble. There was a slight seam between the two halves, so I busted out the great new liquid green stuff filler from GW. You know, GW puts out a lot of hobby crap. A lot of over-priced hobby crap in most instances. However, I have to say that the new liquid green stuff is magic in a jar.

OK...primed white.

Black wash. As always, this defines the detail on the figure and gets some base line shading in.

Base coats. I'm using Foundry's Arctic Grey set on the Grey horse, and Chestnut for the...Chestnut. The base coat is put down very thin.

Some darker shading next. I'm using Vallejo washes most of the time now. This is a great new product line. The Grey gets a wash of black, and I also added a little black paint to the wash to do the legs. I washed the Chestnut with a mix of Umber and Fleshtone. I think the challenge with a Chestnut, which is essentially a mono-color horse, is to get a convincing tone of paint. Mixing these two washes helped achieve that (I hope).

I darkened up the Grey's mane and tail, and then when on to highlighting. The muscle articulation on the sculpts was subtle, but very nice. I just used the sculpt as a guideline for laying down the highlights, which were painted on as fairly light glazes. Just a few passes each. The Grey gets the mid-tone Arctic Grey and then a little White. The Chestnut just gets the mid-tone Chestnut paint. I didn't go any lighter, because the second paint in this set is light enough for the color I was looking for.

OK, with the coat colors down, I went in and did the hooves (Rawhide for the Chestnut). I also did the socks on the Chestnut, starting with grey and then highlighting in white. There isn't a lot of tack on these horses. Just the armored head piece, some leather straps, a saddle blanket and the saddle. Didn't pay too much attention here, since the rider figure covers most of the saddle. Finally did the base as well, and that's it. Two horses from Middle-earth (or New Zealand, or where ever).

Popped on the riders, and Bob's your uncle.

Hope you found this tutorial useful. If you have suggestions for how I can make posts more useful for you, just send a note.

'Til next time.