A horse of a different colour part 10 - painting greys, duns, roans etc

You know how I said this would be positively the last part of this series? Well. It sort of is. This is the last of the 'Mike pontificates a lot' posts. I am systematically working on painting, and photographing stage by stage as I go, examples of most of the main colours and markings, and these should appear one at a time over the next week or two. For once, I'm not in a hurry and trying to batch paint horses by the dozen, so do actually have time to do this.

Anyway, that aside, let's crack on with some of the other relatively common horse colours. Unfortunately, these do tend to produce more variations within an expression of a gene than the 'straightforward' ones, so I'm going to be saying 'use a reference photo' a lot. Hopefully, though, the previous articles will have meant that you understand why horses are the colour they are, and that can inform how you approach painting them.

Greys

Here's where the fun starts - a quick Google image search should make it pretty clear that the range can vary from quite a dark grey (usually on a horse that started out black as a foal), through a range of shades, with our without dappling, to almost white, and past there to flea-bitten. Start by deciding what colour the animal started out (all together now: "mostly bay"), as that'll govern some of your approach, and also the mane and tail colour - if it's a bay or black, odds are the mane and tail may stay pretty dark. If the animal's at an early stage of grey, it's probably worth starting out painting it the underlying colour, and then adding the grey by a combination of drybrushing and stippling. If it's a definite grey, you can probably get away with starting with a suitable grey shade.

Really, your best bet is to pick a suitable reference picture, and work from there - greying is a pretty idiosyncratic thing! Greys do tend to be 'hero horses', unless you're working with an 1815 British army, so you probably won't be painting too many. It's also worth noting that the mane and tail on a grey tend to go at a completely different rate to the coat, so it's quite possible, for example, to have a grey with a flaxen mane!

Dapple and flea-bitten

I've had success with these with a stippling approach. For a dapple grey, start by painting the horse a darker shade (I've mixed Astronomican Grey and Chaos Black, or you could even start out with a greying bay/chestnut). Then take a large, knackered, round brush with spread bristles (the one you left in the dip too long is a good bet), pick up some pale grey or white  on just the tips of the hairs, and dab it almost dry on kitchen roll - dab, rather than wipe, seems to work better. Once you can tap the end on a surface and get a pattern of tiny dots, you're in the right ballpark. Apply carefully to the horse (again, I really recommend a reference photo) with the same light, dabbing motion.

For flea-bitten (and by extension bloody-shouldered) greys, start with an almost-white grey horse, and do the same, but stippling one of the shades you'd use for bay, if anything even more sparingly.

On one of my 'hero' horses for my El Cid army, I tried the other approach - that of spraying very lightly from a distance of about 2' with Army Painter spray white. It's a bit nerve-wracking, but it does work!

Duns

As I'm sure you remember, dun is a colour dilution gene. As far as painting goes, you can treat the animal like a bay, chestnut or black, but picking the right base colour - the brown/red shade in bays and chestnuts lightens to anything from almost cream to almost pink, via some very nice honey/gold shades. Again, a reference photo will help, but the important thing to remember with duns are the 'dun face' (generally darker) and the primitive markings - a black line down the spine from mane to tail is almost always visible, and some have barring around the knee/hock joint.

Roans

Roans differ from duns in that the apparent lightening of colour is caused by an even mix of normal coloured hairs and white. The result tends to look almost washed out, if you check some of the reference photos, and I went on a hunch that a good approach would be to paint a normal coloured horse, and then apply a very very dilute wash of either white or Astronomican Grey. It seems to work.

Battle Report - 04 Mar 2013 - Judge Dredd Prog 1

Monday was the first night of the club's Judge Dredd campaign. The system is very bloody and short, as I think I commented before, and we got several games in, of which I'll only detail the first one today, as the battle reports are pretty labour intensive.

Suffice it to say that Paul's Citi-Def force (from James Cameron Block, that well-known 20th century documentary filmmaker) didn't last long against Judges Turner and Stone, and Psi-Judge Nicks.

Old Stuff Day

Via Ray at "Don't Throw a 1":

The idea of posting up some links to some unloved and unappreciated posts is the brainchild of Warhammer 39999.com. From his blog: 

"This is why I’m proposing all bloggers highlight the content they’re most proud of on March 2nd in celebration of “Old Stuff Day.” On this day, each blogger can go through their history and find posts that they’d like to shake the dust off and present again to the community at large. Some suggestions for content that would be good to post:

• Posts that you considered special that didn’t receive as much attention as you thought they deserved
• Content that people liked in the past, but haven’t seen recently
• Posts you might have created before your site received much traffic, and now deserve to be re-shown
• Or any content you’re particularly proud of!"

The official day was March 2, but I was otherwise occupied, so here I am a couple of days late with an old how-to, an old creative battle report and some old photos.

As it's just popped up on the Lardies list, I figured a fresh link to my post on how to fix the dreaded grey misting varnish problem wouldn't hurt. I really should dig that army out, see how it's lasted and varnish it again.

The Saga of the White Ravens was my first crack at Saxon alliterative verse, before Andy Hawes and I got seriously stuck into Dux Britanniarum.

My camera packed up halfway into our club's first game of Pyramid of Peril at Hammerhead 2012, but I did manage to rescue these off the Compact Flash card.

Cleaning out the store

For want of a better term, anyway.

In happier times...

One of the very obvious things about the Maunsfield Games store (i.e. the shop on site at what-used-to-be-Malestrom) is that it exists merely to shift what stock they have left. I'm not going to even try and speculate on exactly who 'they' are, and which of the companies concerned in the whole shebang it belongs/belonged to, but it's clear they're not restocking at all.

There's a big table of 'grab bins' of assorted magazines, Templar's Forge (Maelstrom's own brand, IIRC) templates, obscure figure ranges, sprues, and Maelstrom Purple spray paint at £1 or 50p depending. There's about half a wall of Flames of War blisters (most of the good stuff gone), some SAGA, some Warlord, about half a dozen boxes of 20mm Plastic Soldier Company, 3 boxes of Victrix plastic hoplites, two racks of Vallejo paints, a denuded rack of Army Painter, some Dystopian Wars and Uncharted Seas, and a bunch of other stuff I wasn't interested in. To add further to the slightly gloomy feel, a fair amount of the stock isn't on the system and the guy behind the till seemed not to care over much as long as some money changed hands. I got four SAGA blisters for £20 total - he was quite happy to handwave them at a fiver each - and Bag The Hun for 50p.

One wonders what's going to happen to the place.

Not, you understand, that I'm complaining. I managed to nail, for a grand total of about £55:

• A dozen SAGA Norman/Breton cavalry plus a warlord (RRP about £43 total)
• 3 Battlefront Jeeps. (£7)
• A can of Army Painter Crystal Blue (£8.50)
• A can of Army Painter "Maelstrom" Purple - Alien Purple relabelled for Maelstrom (£8.50)
• Half a dozen Army Painter Warpaints (£15)
• A copy of the Lardies "Bag The Hun" rules. (£16)
• An Army Painter brush (£2.50)
• A set of "Price of Glory" WW1 skirmish rules (£10)

Battle Report - 03 May 2013 - WAB GT Day 2

The prize table, with generous donation from Warlord,
4Ground, Foundry and others.

Yes. I did win one.

Back at what-used-to-be-Maelstrom for day 2 of the WAB GT. Two games only today, which is probably a good job, since I think I'd have just crawled into a little heap and crashed after three. Five games in two days is hard work!

On the way up, I commented to Grahame that despite 20% of the entrants bringing Selucid armies, I'd managed to avoid any chariots, cavalry wedges or pike blocks.

So of course, I drew Mario Kkounnous in round 4, whose Selucids had all three! (And were also absolutely gorgeous - he does sculpt for Empire Models, I understand - and richly deserving of the best painted award). An absolute cracker of a game with a thorough gentleman of an opponent: it pretty much hinged on one reform test I had to make to get my cataphracts turned to face his Thorakitoi. If I'd made it, the result would, we both agreed, have been very different from the 28-4 thrashing it ended up it. That Parthian army is very brittle - the archers only have Ld 6, and do tend to run a lot: on a 6'x'4' table its quite hard not to wind up panicking nearby units when they do! Even so, I can stand losing all the horse archers without hitting break point. However, losing even one of the two units of cataphracts is almost certainly going to break it.

On the good side, I did manage to stampede one of Mario's elephants into the other., which led to the entertaining sight of them stampeding one after the other across the front of two stands of pike while the pike stood and waited!

So, last battle: bottom two, which turns out to be me and Simon's Carthaginians again! I'm about 14 points behind, which means, unlike last year, I can fail to come dead last if I beat him by enough. Simon's a thorough gent and a fun opponent, and we wound up on a fairly open table. On my first move, I managed (with the aid of the Nomad Horseman special move) to get forty eight shots in on his elephant. (C'mon. Big grey thing, standing out in the open, the size of a barn! What else was I going to shoot at?) For a total of one wound from twenty two hits. Which he made the roll not to stampede for.

For an encore, I got greedy and stupid, and paid the price. I was pretty sure the elephant was just out of charge range, so when it charged I elected not to do the thing my archers are good at. Run the $%^&*( away. And was it out of charge range? Nope. In by about a quarter of an inch.

Ever seen one elephant rout an entire army? Its second follow-through charge hit my general and cataphracts. To their credit, they lasted about three turns, but...

So. Once again, last. And, you know what? It doesn't actually matter. To quote what I just said on WABForum:

[A] massive thank you to Andy and Phil for the organisation, but as importantly to everyone else for coming, for proving that WAB isn't dead and for generally making it a great day. I don't (gee, you couldn't have guessed!!??? ) come to tournaments to win, I come because the WAB community in the UK is a bunch of thoroughly decent folks that it's always a pleasure to hang out with and sit/stand across a table from.

Long may it continue.

I'll leave Andy to announce the results at the pointy end on the official site.

Battle Report - 02 Mar 2013 - WAB GT day 1

Rocked up at Grahame's, Parthians painted, varnished and ready to rock, at 7.30am: we made it to what's officially now known as Maunsfield Games well before 9, so time for a tea and a natter with the rest of the arrivals before kickoff at 9.30.

The format is three games today (of which the middle one used the interesting scouting rules I mentioned last week) and two more tomorrow - have to say I'm very glad it's not three tomorrow, as I am already pretty wiped! For round 1 I drew Pat Lowinger (of Historical Wargames podcast fame) and his rather nice-looking Selucid army: an interesting battle, punctuated with much natter, and an agreement to meet up (with luck) when I'm in Seattle in a week's time. The Parthians once again proved to be an exercise in traffic management, which almost worked: my undoing was the opposition elephants.

Next up I drew Simon Pope's Carthaginians, which proved to be a very long drawn out fight that was called for time, rather than break point. I'd probably have got even closer were it not that my army has only two units that can hold table quarters! As it was, it was 14-18 to Simon.

Last up, I got Tony Stafford's Lydians - an interesting army in that its primarily made up of socking huge warbands. The mistake I made here was not letting him come to me, since failed warband tests would have given me a chance of breaking through his line - even then, it was always going to be tough, since my cataphracts were consistently outnumbered 2:1 or better, and thus his warbands didn't break despite losing combats by 5, nor did pouring 36 arrow shots into one do enough casualties to even make it take a morale test. Those things were huge.

So - so far? played 3, won 0. But having a blast, and not (I don't think) last.

Kickstarter Watch - TAG Tudor 28mms

(image linked from TAG's site)

A much more wargaming-related Kickstarter drawn to my attention today, this is The Assault Group's Tudor/Valois/Hapsburg range in 28mm. The Kickstarter started today, finishes at the end of the month and is aiming for £20K.

And I quote:

The English Tudor armies are these given in Osprey’s Field of Glory Renaissance rules;

7) EARLY HENRICIAN ENGLISH

9) BORDER REIVERS

11) ANGLO IRISH

16) LATER HENRICIAN ENGLISH

19) ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH 

Tudor armies cover the whole 16th Century, under 4 (or 5) Monarchs, but we have chosen to concentrate our efforts on the middle period, making miniatures for the Campaign in France by Henry VIII in 1544.

The troops from this army will enable us to cover Tudor armies for about 40 years, in the middle of the century, covering the end of the early list, the whole of the middle list, and the start of the later, Elizabethan list.

We plan to make about 40 packs of new miniatures to fill this army, amounting to about 30 new cavalry models and 100 new infantry, as well as the artillery necessary.

Have to say, they do look rather tasty.

It's also rather interesting to compare them to the Beyond the Gates of Antares Kickstarter, among others. As I said previously, I think one of the big mistakes BtGoA made was aiming far, far too high, rather than using stretch goals. The TAG KS has drawn some comment, even criticism, in that it doesn't seem to have much at all in the way of stretch goals, and seems to be aiming purely at raising the money to make the figures. The basic pledge level is pretty much £30-36 for a pack of 24 foot, 12 cavalry or 6 artillery. Very pretty and very tempting, too :D

Personally? I don't see a problem in that. The ultimate aim of Kickstarter has always been to help people raise advance funding to do things they otherwise couldn't afford to do (another reason why I find BtGoA a bit of a 'WTF?' concept - you can't tell me that RickP and Warlord are too poor to start a new project, and that that project couldn't succeed without raising £300K of advance seed capital).

To reiterate: KS is for the artist to raise capital so the backers can get to see something they otherwise wouldn't. Masses of cheap stuff as a result of economies of scale and insane pledge levels is a bonus. I think we the backers have been rather spoiled by the runaway success of some of the gaming KS's - Reaper, Mantic's Dreadball and Kings of War, Sedition Wars: Battle for Alabaster, Kingdom Death etc - in that because they've gone mental, economies of scale make it possible to produce more plastic/resin per buck for the folks who pledged. I'm not 100% au fait with the economics of small scale figure manufacture, but I'm pretty sure that casting lead doesn't scale as well as plastic or resin.

Using KS for something like this gives you the chance to turn up on day 1 with lots of stuff ready to sell, and gives you the chance to gauge your market by making people put their money where their mouth is. It doesn't necessarily mean if things go mental you can afford to give away more stuff. That only happens if your project has economy of scale: for example, suppose you're doing original oil paintings, one per pledge? It doesn't matter if you get 10 backers or 100, it still takes you the same amount of time and money per backer to produce stuff. Compare to doing expensive art prints of an original: there's a base cost for the original, plus printing setup, and copies are cheap. If you get 10 times the backers you expect, you can give them all TWO prints instead of one and you're still ahead!