NMM paint selection- gold

A short post to answer a few questions regarding paints and Steve's query on dark bay 'orses.

 

These are the colours used for the gold lace and the metal horse furniture, Reaper is a new brand for me and the first time I have used them. I wont go into the process too much you can get a general idea from the photos, Chestnut gold was the base colour with the rest following in the progression as shown, the golden yellow was toned down just a little with the lemon yellow. All the paints were mixed down with water at about 1:1 each was applied sparingly with multiple brush strokes. The orange brown was mixed to a glaze and use to add tone so about 4 parts water to 1 part paint. I'm quite sure I have equivalents in my other paints, a mix of GW/Citadel and Vallejo, although the palomino gold is one of those must have colours no matter what brand you use, very versatile.

click to see the brass bit, stirrup and spurs

 For the brass fittings I just made up a quick combination of a base of chestnut gold with palomino gold mid tone and lemon yellow high lights, it will do until I can find something better.
I should also add that I used a wet pallet while painting this which allows easy blending of paint so the colour used may be tinted with another


The black/brown horsie is pretty quick to achieve Steve the wargamer, first I should say that the undercoat is grey car primer, I don't know if has much affect on the finished colour but just in case it does.

OK two washes of dark brown to start, in this case I used Reaper blackened brown (if you look at the saddle area you can see the finished colour for this section of the guide), now any shading you would like to give to the horse give another two washes with the blackened brown, an example would be under the belly inside the legs etc, Front Rank horses have remarkably little muscle detail so you wont spend long on this phase picking out the muscle shading, a bit on the rear flank and the legs.

OK choose your brown, for this horse I used chestnut, and ever so lightly pick out the muscle definition *snort* and high lights with a dry brushing, it is important you don't go too heavy on the dry brushing just get that tint of brown. When your finished with the dry brushing coat the horse with a light wash of black and then repeat the process, drybrush again at the very highest points and wash again and that is it. If you want the horse darker then finish with two light washes of black. Always make sure the wash is properly dry before you start the next step, a hair dryer fixes that. This horse took all of 5 minutes and I'm a notoriously slow painter. I hope that made sense guys a