As regular visitors will know, I’m trying to take advantage of the extra painting time available during lockdown by interspersing my main projects with clearing a bit of the lead mountain.

After having completed the platoon of Hawkmen from The Scene, who had been perched on the lead mountain’s upper slopes for some time (see post last Friday), it was time to get back to my English Civil War armies with another unit of Dutch-style horse.

Like the last unit painted, these are 15mm Hallmark figures from Magister Militum: a close match in size to the Peter Pig figures which, so far, have formed the bulk of the collection.

I decided to try and paint dun-coloured horses this time: using the GW Contrast Aggaros Dunes colour straight from the bottle and then blacking the legs, manes and tails. It seems to have worked quite well, turning out a bay dun or buckskin dun colour.

As an experiment, I also undercoated in the ‘official’ grey undercoat as opposed to the usual white. That worked quite well, as the grey doesn’t show through so much if you miss a bit. Didn’t really notice much difference to the colours though.

One thing I did notice, however, was that the Contrast Black colour is quite fragile i.e. the least scrape across the tails would take some of it off, leaving said undercoat showing through on the most raised bits. In the end I gave each horse a quick stroke of normal black paint straight down the tail which solved the problem. A pity, though, as the hair on dun coloured horses is rarely pure black: it tends to have medium dark brown strands as well, and the pure Contrast black simulated a non-block-black quite well.

The rest of the figures were also painted with Contrast Paints, except for the sleeves in white. I had to use normal acrylic white over the grey undercoat as the Contrast white didn’t really do anything: just came out a bit dingy. Contrast white over Warithbone white in future, I think.

Right, with another “main project” unit done, off to the lead mountain to see what I can find to paint up next.