Finished - Bretonnian Knights

I finished these a while ago right after the Black Knights. I traded their paint job for a Battlefoam Shield Bag with pull and pluck foam. In retrospect I should have asked for more as they took forever. I am beginning to see why so many people request that I paint cavalry for them. They have a massive amount of surface area and detail. I would say that they are equivalent to two Terminators in the amount of time it takes to paint them.

The client sent me with a sample Knight to use as a template, one Champion model and 5 knights to be painted. The color scheme was simple halves. One side of the caparison was to be black and the other half teal-blue. His specific colors made necessitated my buying some new paint because I typically do not paint teal-blues.


I had never painted blue fabric before but blue is an easy color. The client was a really good painter so am I really did that he did not do was add a little shading. The metals, fabric and wood was all prtty straight-forward. What was hard was the horse hair and skin.

I know that not all horses are Clydesdales, but they are the easiest to paint. I am no expert but I am pretty sure that draft horses do not make good war horses. I had the hardest time getting the brown skin to look right. GW changed the venerable Bestial Brown and replaced it with the slightly darker and less versatile Mournfang Brown. It is great for a base which it is but not good for a layer which it is not. I may need to get a different brown like Skrag Brown and mix them to get the same versatility that I got out of a single paint color.

In the end, I kind of gave up on painting the horses. I knew that I was no going to be able to paint them as well as I wanted and settled for painting them as well as I could. I drybrushed the hair on the legs with Rakarth Flesh and washed it Seraphim Sepia. After a touch-up, I called it good and moved on.

I also offered to paint an HQ model for free to get him to agree to the deal. He chose a Knight champion. He wanted it painted in a different but similar color scheme. I have a great and simple way to paint gold, so I suggested that. I incorporated some teal-blue colors into the paint scheme to tie him in with his group.

I enjoyed the experience of painting more horses but most of all I enjoy that they are finished. I learned a lot from painting these Knights. The main lesson is to charge more for painting anything riding on a horse.

I dislike how they turned out. I know that I could have done better and that galls me. I don't know that I could have spent any more time on them though.

The paint job may only be 5/10 for me but that is offset by how long they took to finish. Retail on these minis is only about $26 but the paintjob is probably worth twice that. I would value the trade at about $50 which is in line with the trade. Doing that last little bit of math makes me feel better about the evenness of the trade.