Matchstick Madness part 3

Having become reasonably adept at creating bodies of infantry I thought it was time to try my hand with cavalry.  When I was building the Altar of Freedom armies I chickened out at this stage and just bought some of Irregular miniature's 2mm figures as I only needed a handful of units.  Seventeenth century armies are a different kettle of fish (or possibly stable of horses) as the armies were often 50% cavalry.  That meant that I felt it was worth spending a little time considering options for scratch building some donkey wallopers.  My first port of call was the web but everything I found focussed on infantry and like me when it came to the mounted arm the posters had all bought castings to do the job.  The 2mm and small scale group on face book had a couple of examples but they looked to be rather time consuming to make.  So it was back to the drawing board I had to go.

Here is the size relationship between infantryman and cavalryman 

The first thing to do was to establish the relative height of a horse compared to a standing man.  While I have stood next to re-enactment cavalry more times than I care to remember I have always been 'otherwise engaged' at those moments and not taking detailed notes (as shown above, yes dear reader that's me in the red coat)!  My feeling is that a cavalry horse is about the same height as an infantryman measuring to the horse's shoulder.  My quick google search confirmed this as a reasonable rule of thumb.  The head is about half as high again measuring to the ears.  So the illustration below shows a possible configuration from the side.  The square being a single matchstick in end section to show the height of an infantry formation in a couple of ranks.  The horse being two match sticks and a card upright for the rider.  The sizes look about right to my eye although it doesn't look much like a horse.

A basic comparison of side views

If I trial a bit of conversion by paintbrush to see how it might look then it starts to improve a little bit and appears slightly more convincing.  

But still not going to win prizes at Horse of the Year

The issue is how to get the head to sit where it needs to be and how to model the neck.  The head should be dropped about 40 or 45 degrees and there should be a slope upwards from the shoulder to the base of the 'skull'.  However, that's not the biggest problem.  The biggest problem with the look of these is the top view of a rank of horses .as unlike infantry where a single length of match sticks can fool the eye horses are in a more open order with each horse being a separate lump of whatever I eventually model it from.  The next issue is how to model the rider as a single rider is only going to have a thin cross section compared to blocks of infantry.  Below are the prototype horse bodies (in three and six rank formations) as seen from above, front and rear.  When scaled down to the correct size they don't look too bad but I need to add heads and riders still.

Still not going to be at Olympia (assuming horse of the year is still held there)

I'm beginning to remember why I caved in and went back to Irregular for my 2mm cavalry!