Lord Uxbridge WIP part 1

So on Friday after noon I began work on Lord Uxbridge and his ADC´s. The first step was the tigerskin pelt for Uxbridge´s horse which was finished by the time we start our SAGA game on Friday night. Although not really, since I was not to happy with the striping. Now most of the stripes on a real tigers legs form basic chevron shapes. Which is what I painted, without realising that the “wings” do rarely connect at the “tip”. So some of the stripes were removed yesterday (which meant repainting the basic colour and shading it :-() and new ones painted on. Now the “wings actually run past one another as they should. Now I am much happier with the pelt. The stripes themselves were highlighted with iron oxide black, which is actually a brown so dark it is almost black. The highlights do not stand out yet and I really hope this changes when the mini is varnished.

At this point I also realised that I had a problem with two of the three minis representing Uxbridge´s ADC´s. Only one of the horses actually had an officers saddle cloth, the other two had ones for troopers (not that big a surprise since one of them was originally a bugler, the other a NCO). So I broke out the Dremel and grinded the blankets away and sculpted new ones with green stuff. You should still be able to see the green part on the photo below I am just glad I realised my mistake before I started painting them!

Next up were the horses. Basic tones and first highlight so far. Now there is no information that I could find as to what colour the ADC´s horses had, so I was quiet free there. I went for a black horse with Captain Seymour, since the 18th Hussars had white facings and silver piping, tassels and so on. Also the saddle cloth is pretty light in colour so I felt that a dark horse would give a nice contrast. The other two are wearing uniforms with gold tassels and have darker saddle cloths, so I went with a grey for one of them and a light brown for the other.

Uxbridge was more of a problem in this regard. I found no texts regarding the colour of his horse at Waterloo, so I went for paintings. Bad idea! About half of the paintings I could find show him on a chestnut, the other half on a silver white. In the end I went for a chestnut for two reasons. First the belly and insides of the legs of a tigers fur are white. Therefore the edges of the pelt are white as well. So I would either have had to blackline the edge of the pelt (which I find is one of the most visually unappealing techniques when it come to painting minis) or loose the contrast between pelt and horse. Second all of the paintings showing him on a grey are newer paintings, while all the older ones (= closer to the actual event) show him on a chestnut. So I assumed that this was correct anyway.

Lord Uxbridge and ADC´s (WIP 1)

So this is where it stands right now. I shall post daily updates regarding the progress (unless I do not paint on a given day or there is a battle report to post). As I said before I am not much of a WIP man, but with the small scope of this La Bricole Challenge it should give me a nice chance to give sort of a step by step series on how I paint minis. Hope this will meet your interest as well.