Resolutions January: Undead Cavalry

Jan 20, 2014 08:58

Yours truly faking painting. 

Note the beverage of the gods.

Undead Cavalry The undead cavalry is done. Composed of seven Liteupski lancers, five Zombiski cossacks and two Winged Wraith Hussars, they are ready to strike fear into the hearts of invading pansies everywhere.

It's been a long time since I last painted cavalry in any real way (a smallish batch of pack horses doesn't really count). Initially I figured a cavalry figure would be roughly twice as hard to paint as an infantryman, but in reality it's quite a bit more, especially if you plan to give any real attention to the mounts. There's additional surface to paint, there's really (at least) two distinct color schemes to paint -- unless you have horses riding horses which given some recent figure releases wouldn't surprise me anymore -- and there is additional assembly work. In addition the riders are slightly more difficult to handle in painting. I managed to butt-spike the zombies but the skeletons were just too skinny to take a wire in the rear.

I assume painting horses will become faster once I get the routine fired up, but right now I'm quite pleased I didn't start with living horses. If zombie horses look a bit weird it's because they're rotting zombies, not because I couldn't paint them, right?

Undead Cossacks The thing with Flintloque that I find disconcerting is that while the troop types and uniforms are clearly inspired by real Napoleonic troops and uniforms, they aren't exactly correct either. For me this creates a vague uncertain feeling -- I can't think up the color scheme independently but neither can I find exact references either. The lancers are clearly inspired by the real Litovksi lancers, but then again they're also supposed to be guard, which in my rudimentary research seems to have been a separate lancer unit with a separate color scheme. Which one I'm supposed to use? And then there's the uniform details. Missing ones can be ignored but what about the new ones that have been added to the uniforms? I'm a neophyte when it comes to Napoleonics and very easily confused by all the possible variations. What I'd really need is the most common scheme and figures to match that exactly and when I'm comfortable with that I can expand into variations...

Another thing about the figures is that they are pretty old, from the days before the lead bans. Consequently the metal is very soft. I'm an old hand with lead figures and generally I have no trouble, but I must say the wings on the hussar horses are way too fragile.

Undead Cavalry In other news, I've been struggling with the lack of light this time of the year brings. I'm not a photographer by any stretch of imagination and mostly I just trust the camera automation to make the right choices for me. But when exposure times are driven below 1/10 second, taking pictures without a tripod becomes really difficult. So I set the camera to high ISO for the latest batch of figures and while it did fix the exposure times, the pictures do get a bit grainy. Apparently on the high setting the automatics choose somewhat too high values. I will continue to experiment with this.

Well, done is done. Next month I'll dip into the undead infantry.

Right now I'll concentrate on something I actually wanted to paint... expect some tanky business very soon.


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