Saga Normans speedpaint

I started with the horses as I find these the easiest to do.  Most gamers get horse colours wrong.  The majority of modern European horses are of mixed warmblood stock and many have Thoroughbred in the mix somewhere along the line.  This produces horses of mostly solid colours and with a bias toward chestnut coats so horses that are either full chestnuts or bay (chestnut/brown coat with black points i.e. lower legs, mane, tail and ears are black).  Coloured horses are also common in European mixed breeding where warmblood and coldblood horses are combined however they tend to a smaller size than the sport horse breeds that are today’s version of the warhorses of yore.  What horses aren’t is all a single colour.  Even horses of a ‘solid’ colour are usually marked with white on their face and legs.  A white star or blaze is most common but can extend to a fully white face.  Likewise legs can feature from one to four with a white marking and marks can go from just a line around the lower foot (coronet) through socks that extend half way up the fetlock (lower leg) to stockings that get up to or above the knee/hock joint in the middle of the leg. The only colour that doesn’t usually have white leg marking is bay.

The start of a speedpaint horse is an ink colour over the zenith undercoat.  I prefer the range of redish brown that are in my collection, chestnut ink, Flesh wash, Ogryn Flesh and Gryphone Sepia.  Less common colours are black, grey and brown but they stand out nicely so I’ll have a few to break up the look of these units.  They need to look distinctive as this is a skirmish game.  Black will be one of the different black inks, grey can range from white to ‘iron grey’ which is a dark grey colour so will be either additional white drybrushed over the zenith or a grey ink wash to darken it down slightly.  Brown is done with a brown ink.

One coat of ink usually does it.  Nothing else needed.  White is added at the end of the paint job.

You can see I found a banner bearer for The Bastard.  Tursin fitz Rolf by Footsore Miniatures. It goes against my nature to have any project use miniatures from a single manufacturer.