I’m back with an update to the project. As I mentioned in my first post this is my first time painting cavalry, so I decided to start with the horses. I did some research on horses in French cavalry regiments and I came across this wonderful site called
Napoleon, His Army and Enemies:
http://napoleonistyka.atspace.com/ The page about French cavalry contains the following information:
- I Squadron (1st 'elite' company on blacks, 5th company on dark browns)
- II Squadron (2nd and 6th company) on bays
- III Squadron (3rd and 7th company) on chestnuts
- IV Squadron (4th and 8th company) on grays
The site mentions that this practice was abandoned in wartime, but this is a good overview of the horse colors I would need to paint.
In researching horse colors I came across a site called
Equinest which has a great section on horse colors:
http://www.theequinest.com/colors/As you can see on this site, there are a lot of variations in the colors of bays, chestnuts and grays.
The last thing to do was to select the paints I would use for each horse color. I decided to start with a black, a dark (brown) bay, a chestnut and a grey, here is a pic:
I really enjoyed painting these figures, the horse musculature really lends itself to painting highlights and the Italeri horses are really well sculpted. For now I just focused on getting the paint colors down; later I will go back and paint features such as the eyes and the markings often found on the legs and faces.
Here is a close up of the black horse:
This horse will be the mount for the converted elite company Dragoon with bearskin pictured in the original post.
Black horses are usually described as very dark brown, so I started with a basecoat of Vallejo Model Color German Camo Black Brown, highlighted with P3 Umbral Umber and shaded with a black wash.
Next pic is a close up of the Dark Bay (sometimes called a Black Bay or Mahogany Bay):
For this figure I was going to use the Wargames Foundry Bay Brown triad (appropriately enough) but the highlight color in the triad is a very deep red which didn’t match the color I had in mind. So I did a little searching on the internet a came across this website:
http://www.sascha-herm.com/Sascha Herm is a terrific figure painter who features mainly historical figures on his site. Based on his paint choices I replaced the Foundry Bay Brown highlight with Foundry Chestnut 53B and Foundry Chestnut Light 53C.
The third close-up is of the Chestnut:
This one was pretty straight forward, I used the Wargames Foundry Chestnut triad but for the final highlight I added a little bit of P3 Menoth White Base.
Last pic is of the gray, which will be the mount for the unit’s Trumpeter.
Painting this figure should have been easy but it actually gave me quite a bit of trouble. I basecoated with a 1:6 mix of Vallejo Model Color Dark Sea Grey and White Grey but this was darker than I intended so I ended up adding a lot of highlight layers and my transitions got choppy as a result. I need to go back and add some glazes to smooth the transitions between highlights but I am happy with the strong contrast.
In addition to these four figures pictured I have been painting some additional practice figures. There is one color that I really want to include but which I can’t seem to match, it is of a standard bay (fourth picture on this page):
http://www.theequinest.com/colors/modifiers/bay/I’ve tried various combinations of red-browns and orange-browns but I can’t seem to match this shade. If anyone has any recommendations please let me know.
Any feedback or comments are appreciated.