With all the time preparing and fighting the Battle of Bitteburg, my painting time has been somewhat curtailed. It’s also that time of year when the pressure is on to get ready for Christmas a month in advance of the actual event! To be fair, some of this is driven by family get togethers, when presents are exchanged early, whilst socialising and catching up. The net result is that very little progress has been made with my various modelling projects.
Horses for Napoleons Coach
I have made some progress, though. The horses are nearly finished and I’ve started to paint the coach itself. I’ve decided to paint pure white horses for the coach, rather than greys. Just to make life difficult for myself, I’ve been layering the paint on to build depth of colour and highlights rather than my usual technique of ‘paint & wash’. So the horses were undercoated in Black, painted Light Grey, then Sky Grey and then Off White. I have used a Vallejo Light Grey wash over the mane and tail to bring out the texture. I then touched up the horses tack in Black, painted their eyes and decided that I had enough of painting them for the time being!
Off Side Horses
There is still much to do though. The hooves are black at the moment and these need to be painted either in a light brown or beige. The metal parts of the tack need to be picked out and the tack will need highlighting with a black grey to show the detail. I also need to do some more work on the faces, to add detail to the muzzles, nostrils & ears. Finally, I might add a bright white highlight to the horses. I’m deliberately going for a very bright stark look to the horses. I realise that they would in reality have muddy hooves & legs and I may yet add this but I wanted the horses to look over exaggerated in their pristine appearance, as though they were specially chosen to pull the Emperors coach.
The coach itself
As for the coach itself, I’ve started to paint this but I’m not happy with the shade of green. I’m using Vallejo flat Green but it looks too bright. I think that I will go back and repaint it in the darker Reflective Green shade. I’ve picked out the interior seats with a Red Black and used Saddle brown for the coach mans seat. The wheels are also painted green although I’ve experimented with a darker green for the front wheels. All this messing around has meant that I’m still a long way from finishing this project. I think that given a good long painting session rather than the odd half hour here and there I could get this done but with even more commitments looming for the Festive season, it will be a couple of weeks before I can even think about basing this project.