So far I've only painted infantry so it was time to paint some cavalry starting with some horse archers. These are just test pieces as Arab armies rarely contained horse archers until they started recruiting Turks during the later Abbasid period.
I had two "painting" reasons for trying some cavalry. Firstly to see what the Forged in Battle horses are like to paint. Secondly, to see how the horse colours alter the overall look of my muted colour palette.
As expected the strong horse colours changed how the riders look. To me they look less "faded" despite essentially the same muted palette as before. For the next batch of cavalry I may try more white.
Half way through this batch I decided to experiment and try stronger colours for the head wear on one or two figures. This was to test an idea I had to increase the use of colour as the cavalry get heavier. So medium cavalry would be more colourful than light horse and heavy cavalry would be more colourful than medium cavalry (as well as being armoured). I'm currently undecided about taking this approach any further.
Figure review
As before, there was some flash and the odd awkwardly placed mould line that had to be removed. The riders are quite busy with quivers and bow cases which make them fiddly (and slow) to paint but the horses compensate for this as they are reasonably quick to paint.
Sadly, with one of the horses the front legs were almost crossed and had to levered apart. In the end I had to put card wedges under one side of this horse during basing to straighten the model. Not great. I will see if I can correct this when I prepare the models for painting.
Some horses are quite long and placing three on a 40 by 30 mm base will result in heads and tails hanging over the base which will make them awkward to use during a game. For the light horse, with two per base, I simply angled the models slightly to prevent this.
As with the infantry, I found that the lower boundaries, say between the waist band and the tunic, are not as clean as I'd like for ease of painting. The same holds for some of the tack on the horses. This is annoying me quite bit.
Basing Scheme
See previous post for details.Slide show
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