Santa's Workshop

In the Horseflesh

First off, happy New Years to everyone. Here is the promised article on painting horses. Before I say another word, I'd like to say that everyone has their own preferred style of painting, and I'm not trying to say that this is the end all and be all of horses. In fact, if you have something to add on this or anything else that I've written on, please let me know!

To begin, there are many more colors of horseflesh than there are of people flesh. A good way to get an idea of how it looks would be to either look at some books on horses, or even real horses themselves. Also, John Sauter has an excellent reference on horse coloration, a Historex book. However, to duplicate those colors is too detailed for our wargame purposes, as we want to stick to generalities.

I personally group horses into four categories-brown, black, white and grey. Of these categories, brown has the most variation. For instance, when I do a dark brown horse, I generally drybrush burnt umber over black. To do a midbrown, I base paint autumn brown and wash with either burnt umber or black. A lite brown would be tan washed in burnt umber. You can vary these browns with different shades, but I personally wash from midbrown down, not drybrush, because the contrast between the dark base and the highlight is too sharp. For greys, I generally base paint a shade of grey and wash with a darker shade, or for really dark shade, wash with black. White horses are base painted with off white-I never use straight white, as mother nature doesn't either- and wash with a dark grey. Black horses are the least difficult, as I simply wash them with a strait purple(black horses have a purple sheen to them, believe it or not).

So much for coloration, now to some detail. Horse hair, I generally paint a dark color such as black, because the vast majority of them have dark manes and tails-only a few will have light coloration, and you can do that for the odd one here and there. Next is markings. All horses have some, and they go a long way to making a good paint job. First are blazons, the markings on the nose-I generally paint a white irregular patch of differing sizes on horses - 99% of horses have at least a small blazon. Second are socks. These can be either dark or light-I generally stick with black or white, and these can range to just above the hoof to entire leg. I generally paint white only up to the first joint, and black are whole leg. When I do a black leg, I put a wash of light grey at the top half to blend it together with the rest of the coat. You can vary one to all four legs with these markings. Last but not least is dappling. These are the small white spots generally noticed on the horses flank. I always restrict these to white and grey coats. To paint them, simply take a brush and paint small regular points with your brush, but restrict them to the flanks, very top of the legs, top of the front legs, and only half way up the neck. These should be of a lighter color, not darker, of your top most layer of paint, and I generally use the base color, often white. When done they should be honeycombed on the coat.

Well, that it for my personal philosophy on horseflesh for wargame figures. As I said, its not the end all or be all, if any one has anything to add, just let ole Santa know.