Painting Horses

No I haven't taken to sneaking out into the fields with a pot of emulsion,  I'm not that stir crazy yet from the Covid-19 restrictions (stir, emulsion see what I did there).  However, I do seem to have been painting a lot of 6mm horses of late.  It's my own fault really I did decide that it was time to upgrade my Late Imperial Romans and to give them some credible (and period specific) opposition.  As most of that opposition was well provided with mounted troops I shouldn't be surprised by the amount of horse flesh on the painting table.  Currently I have the last of the Sassanid Persian cavalry waiting for a spray of primer, some Gothic Feoderati for the Romans, and some actual Roman heavy cavalry on the painting mat.

I have never been a fan of all the horses being a single colour so I tend to vary the mix as much as I can.  To make that easier I usually have around 50 castings being worked on at a time.  That lets me mix up a colour and then do one or two horses in each unit in that shade, so that I don't waste paint.  Of course the whole point is to get horses that look like horses so the trick is to get the colours right.

I mostly use Vallejo paints because that is what is easiest to buy locally.  My go to colours for horses are Chocolate Brown (70.872), Light Brown (70.929) Khaki (72.061) and German Grey (70.995).  I use the grey as the base for black horses and for manes and tails, Chocolate brown for browns with a the addition of Flat Red (70.957) and Orange Fire (72.008) to create chestnut shades.  Bone White (72.034) more of a cream colour than a white can be the base of light horses or manes and tails for others.  I particularly like Bays, Duns and Chestnuts as the darker tail and manes sets the look of the horse, but I do add to the mixture by including Blacks and the odd Grey.  For Generals I also add the occasional white as well.  For me the key is to mix my own colours as the variation I get from batch to batch gives a nice variation in tones, when I blend a chestnut or a brown the more red I add to the chocolate brown and orange mix the warmer the brown becomes which is great for that particular coat colour.

Horses - Any colour you like as long as its brown (or black or grey).  Painting WiP

I select colours from a book I was recommended many years ago called 'Horse by Horse - a field guide to horse breeds'.  It’s similar to a Blandford's uniform guide in layout, it starts with an explanation of horse colours and markings and then follows that up with colour illustrations of different horse breeds on a one per page basis. Lots of really useful reference material all in place.  Best of all it was available at the local book remainder shop at a knock down price, I don't recall what I paid but the recommended retail price was a mighty £1.95 so probably about £1.00.  That was probably a couple of decades ago (I just checked, try first published 41 years ago!) but it has been my go to reference since I got it.  I know similar guides are on the web nowadays but there is something about having a real book to leaf through that still appeals to me.  My copy falls open at the page covering the Mongolian Wild Horse, which probably says something about the type of horses I spent a lot of time painting when I was into 25mm figures.

According to Amazon it was published on 10th August 1979

Nice useful images inside too

In the modern world you would probably find it easier to have a web page open on a phone or tablet showing a cart of coat colours but any guide is useful to have available,  It stops us from creating that fabled 'Horse of a different colour' that never existed in nature!

Oh come on! Who wouldn't want to see The Charge of the Light Brigade mounted on these (Other My Little Pony models are available)

Locked down and busier than ever

The story so far.  Following on from my healthcheck before Christmas which identified a potential problem further investigations have found two fairly badly blocked coronary arteries.  This in turn led to a nice ride in an ambulance to Scunthorpe's finest (and only) A&E department a fortnight ago. 

Scunthorpe's A&E  has one major advantage which is that it isn't in Hull. While I am as happy as the next man  to watch the antics of some of the world's finest nutters on TV they seem to lack that certain something when viewed live, probably distance and a sense of safety.  At home I never have that sense that at moment someone might clasp me warmly around the throat while enquiry as to the object of my attention.  AKA 'what you looking at pal'.

Hull A&E has a different class of nutter than Scunthorpe, they tend to edge more to the handcuffs are just another class of bling clientele and have a distinct air of I'm not stopping long I have to be back in my cell before lights out.  Scunthorpe boasts the chatty but socially undesirable type of nutter, you know the ones; when faced with tricky purchasing decisions they tend to favour Buckfast's finest falling down water to soap.  Usually they sit next to me on the bus.  Still the care was first class and they even offer tea and toast after a couple or five hours. 

This is not soap, but it does come in a handy back pocket sized bottle

As a bonus it turns out that:

a) I wasn't having a cardiac event and

b) I don't have Chronic Kidney Disease, which shows how good the medication I have been taking for the last 15 years must be as when I started on it I had stage 3 CKD! (hint there is no cure for CKD and it can't be reversed) 

As a further bonus eventually I was allowed to go home.  This little outing led to one of those interesting chats with my GP, well I say my GP he hasn't been available since 2018 it must have been something I said.  You know the one it starts with 'what seems to be the matter' and responding with 'I was hoping you were going to tell me that' doesn't seem to be the right answer.  Possibly that's why I have seen my actual GP for the last three governments?  Still he did put me on some new medication and sign me off work for two weeks while It took effect, which was good of him.  He didn't realise CKD could be cured either, what is wrong with teaching in medical schools nowadays?  So two weeks with no pesky work getting in the way, what should I do first?  Enter reality stage right.

As Mrs E's broken arm is not allowing her to do as much as she would normally do around the house, my enforced holiday from work slavery turned into work experience of household drudgery!  Who knew that there was so much to do around here!  I have a new found admiration for Mrs E and her ability to keep all the balls in the air and the plates spinning.  If there was a salary to be paid for what she does I have a sneaking suspicion that I wouldn't be able to afford her!

The sick note runs out today so it's back to work in the morning, although working from home on reduced duties until I am told what the next stage in dealing with my arteries should be.  Apparently Dyno Rod don't have a medical division so it's looking like surgery will be involved.  The lock down hasn't really impacted as I was already self-isolating much to disgust of our dogs who have missed out on walks for the last week or so.  The streets seem much like they were in my childhood with little traffic and no noise pollution to speak of from the bypass (thats road not heart BTW).

In other news I have reduced the lead pile somewhat in the last two weeks but not as much as I had expected.  On the plus side I have found the 'on' button on the washing machine and have mastered the art of clothes pegs! 

Making transfers (Decals) for 6mm Late Roman shields

I have tried freehand painting shields for 6mm figures in the past but  I decided that I didn't like the results.  What I needed was a different approach that would look OK at tabletop distances or if possible closer.  The obvious solution was to use a water slide transfer but I couldn't find any in 6mm scale.

I have been down this road before when I needed some World War One lozenge camouflage for my 1/300th German aircraft.  No one seemed to make it  for that scale so I made my own.  I found a site that had details of the actual  colours used and examples of the patterned fabric and I was able to import an image into paint, brighten the colours slightly and resize it.  I was really surprised and pleased with how it looked.  So when I needed Late Imperial Roman shield patterns, transfers seemed like a workable option.

A work in progress but look at the detail on the lozenge pattern.

To be honest creating transfers is not difficult. The key things to keep in mind are:

• Transfer paper comes with either a transparent or a white backing.  For most modelling uses white backing is best.
• Do a test print of the transfers onto ordinary printer paper to test the size and colours are as expected.  Transfer paper is about £1 a sheet ordinary printer paper is about a tenth of that cost, so make your mistakes on the cheap paper!
• Home printed transfers are not on individual pieces of transfer film.  Instead the entire A4 sheet is one big piece of transfer film.  You will need a good sharp pair of nail scissors or similar (small pointed blades) as you are going to need to cut the printed transfer to the shape you want.  One benefit of the clear transfer paper is that you don't have to be too accurate with this stage, the down side is that a home printer doesn't print in white so any areas that will be white have to painted in before laying down the transfer.
• As printed the transfer isn't water fast until it is sprayed with a varnish.  Two or three light coats of acrylic varnish is best.  Make sure it is really dry before using them.
• Placing the transfers is not any easier that it used to be on those Airfix kits of yesteryear!  In fact it is even more difficult as (in my case) the eyes are not as good as they were back then and the models are a lot smaller.  A couple of fine probes helps get the transfers where you want them.  I use an old paint brush handle with a pin glued and lashed to the end and some probes (like dental probes) I got from Maplins to help place them.
• Even using the standard MS paint software that comes with a windows PC some quite detailed designs can be created if you design at a much larger size that the final product.  Resizing to the required size and re touching the shrunk version can give remarkably good results.  The resizing doesn't create a perfect copy of the larger item hence the need to edit after shrinking the image, but it does capture 90% of the layout and colours.  This might be easier on a more advanced graphic program such as Paintshop Pro.
• Using a specialist product like Decalfix softens the transfer and helps it mold around the model which is useful in dealing with shield bosses. I also hand paint more varnish over the applied transfer when it has dried to ensure good adhesion and to protect the transfer.
• Last but not least experiment with the best way to apply the transfers before going for the final attempt on what will be the finished models.  For very small items I tend to slide it off onto my fingertip to ensure it stays flat then carefully work a probe under the transfer to lift it,  

Example page from the Notitia

Details of the patterns are easy to find on line from the Notitia Dignitatum.  There are no original copies in existence and what we now have available are medieval copies so we cannot be certain of the accuracy of the designs or colours.  In fact there are some discrepancies between the surviving examples.  Another point to be aware of is that the shields are depicted as round but all other evidence shows them to have been oval.  The use of circles was probably to make copying easier.   The WRG book Armies and Enemies of Imperial Rome illustrates all of the shields for the western empire but only as black and white outlines.  Life is a lot easier now we have internet images in colour to work from.

Because I was working with 6mm figures I could simply hint at the finest details of the patterns as they really don't show up that well.  A small dot of colour in the centre of shield boss will probably be a single pixel on the final transfer, so either exaggerate it it or leave it off.

Armegerii Propugnatores Iuniores - those shields are around 5 x 3.5mm

The results I have got are more than good enough for me and are far better than I could have achieved by hand painting the designs.

The entire unit

Blogger slowdown

Readers will have noticed a slow down in the frequency of blog posts over the last couple of weeks.  This is likely to continue for a short while due to some medical issues here.  Mrs E had a fall on some wet grass in tge garden about 10 days ago and has broken her shoulder.  Nothing too nasty although at our age breaks take longer to heal than they did a couple or three decades ago.  On top of which I have had some investigations regarding heart issues and it turns out that I have a couple of blocked coronary arteries which will need sorting out.  Again nothing that modern medical science can't cope with but for a few days last week  I was without full use of my right arm following the tests, which makes doing anything worth blogging about a tad tricky.  I will probably need some 'work' doing to sort the heart issues out which will take me away from the keyboard for a while when it occurs.

This getting old lark is not everything the salesman said it would be.