A Tale of 1 Warden #6: The Horse Barrier

Chipping away at the peasant units in my Battalion I was starting to feel confident with the bright colours and basic methods I want to tie these first few units together so I decided to finally tackle the Knights of the Realm. I'd even found the White Dwarf with the best horse painting tutorial GW ever published (May 2013, the 8^th edition High Elves release, and it uses the modern paint system if you ever want to track a copy down).

Now, I only have myself to blame for my current fatigue. I have eight knights, the tutorial has eight methods and I forgot just how difficult the horse bit of the Bretonnia Knights models were to paint.

This is how one reaches what I have come to call The Horse Barrier.

There was this facetious comment that did the rounds back when Age Of Sigmar was about to launch about why Fantasy was meant to die: “No one likes painting horses.” Its an extremely over-simplified, sarcastic and downright odd belief but I am starting to sympathise.

Now, I don't usually mind painting horses but Bretonnian warhorses are amongst the most user-unfriendly models in the Warhammer canon. The way the legs are moulded into the barding, not always distinctively, means you're constantly trying to reach your brush through the middle of the model at odd angles.

Oh, and the one I was painting as a light bay went a bit wrong and now I have an orange horse and no motivation to fix it. I just want to move on. Sir Donald that knight will be or whatever medieval French equivalent I can find.

Moaning aside I know there's an element of Half Finished Model Syndrome going on. Right now the models look dispiritingly awful because I've spent several sessions over the better part of a week getting only the smallest element of the model done and the rest is undercoat. They look terrible but once I have some more of the model done, like the big block colours of the barding and knight's tabards, it'll look better even if the horses aren't up to much.

The yellow on the Archers isn't actually that consistent but once its part of a complete model with other colours around it the eye is a lot more forgiving.