Tales from the Body Box - I bought some new paints!

Time to talk about paint! 

Over the years I've had a few people ask me what paints I recommend for customs, or touch-ups and restorations to vintage or damaged models. Well, I always use a brand of paint intended for another kind of model entirely : Citadel colours made for Games Workshop (Warhammer) miniatures.
They may be designed for tiny mini soldiers and fantasy creatures, but they're by far the best I've found for our model horses too. They go on very smoothly for brush-painting by hand, whether as base coats or lightly smudged shading layers, they blend well together, and cover neatly in not too many layers without getting lumpy or rough. And best of all, they have this deep, lustrous sheen to them, rather halfway between a matte paint and a gloss, which looks just like the shine on a healthy horse's coat, which does a lot towards making your colours seem vibrant and rich.

They are exasperatingly expensive, in a pounds-per-ml sense, as you pay about £2.75 for a tiny pot whereas £1 will get you ten times as much in the cheaper artist's acrylic, but after early trial and error with all sorts of paint which was a hassle to work with and gave dubious quality results, I've found it worth the cost because the results are so gorgeous and they're so nice to use.

But there's loads of them, and the labels all say different things! Let's make sense of the range...

'Base' colours are thicker and cover a bit more easily, but don't mix smoothly if you're trying to do wet blending or smooth smudgey shaded colours (I've had to scrub paint off and start again because the Base wouldn't play nicely, just clumped and lifted!), so I tend to only buy the Base black & white - black because they don't do it as a Layer paint, and white because it covers better for streak-free markings.

'Layer' colours have a slightly different formula, and these are the ones which blend beautifully together so you can mix and vary your shades, work wet paints together, and add thin layers of lighter or darker tones over a basic coat colour. Go for Layer paints for all your brown/tan/beige/grey coat colours.

There's also various technical paints, and the new 'Contrast' range, which can make the sales stands look confusing at first, but just ignore all those, they're not what we want for model horse painting.

You do have to be careful, as some of the sandy colours tend toward khaki, and some of the browns have a distinctly un-horselike greenish tinge, but remember they're not mixing them with us in mind, and just take care to choose your colours in good light (no, the model/wargames shop people won't mind you picking them up to hold near a window, or taking ten minutes to pick a nice beige - we're in just as nerdy and creative and delightfully obsessive hobby as they are, they'll get it!)

Because they're so pricey, I tend not to buy very many, but each time I do choose a new pot, I can paint some horse colours I haven't done before!
On my most recent trip, as well as my usual favourite chestnut and bay paints, I picked out a pale milk-chocolate shade of brown, and a cream colour which looked nice for cremellos, perlinos, buttermilk duns, or flaxen manes and tails.

My first attempt with the cream paint, a little shading and some black points and we have a sweet little buttermilk buckskin baby! No name yet, but I really do like how she turned out. 

(I bought a mixed lot of very scuffed played-with second hand foals for my body box, so expect a whole flurry of new babies in the Harecroft herd this year!)

And to vary things a bit, meet Peaches and Cream - this one's the same body colour but with a tobiano pinto pattern. The G2 Saddlebred is one of my favourite moulds, she was actually the very first Stablemate I owned (in regular run chestnut) and now my conga line must be over 40 of these showy little mares if we count OF and CM together! I like to carve the moulded braids away, and replace them with plaited thread for the extra touch of realism.

Another foal, this one painted with my new light chocolatey brown, but faded out with softer shading, the way foals' coats are so often paler than their eventual adult colour.

And finally, a trace-clip skewbald on the G3 Warmblood mould, just because the new paler brown paint reminded me of the colour bright bays go when their coats are clipped. This one was painted body colour first, then the clipped areas laid on with a couple of coats of the new brown straight from the pot, then I added the white markings last of all. 

As usual, the pinto pattern didn't turn out as I had in mind (I was planning a lot more white and less colour left showing), but I made it up as I went along and suddenly this just seemed to look like enough, so I left it rather than risking spoiling the paintjob. I've got another G3 WB body, so that one can become the more-white skewbald I intended to make this time round!