Completed Pegaso 90mm Islamic Cavalry

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody,

Today I am posting the first part of what is going to be a rather ambitious detailed step by step of this 90mm mounted figure from Pegaso. We'll cover painting the horse, figure, groundwork, freehands, textures, weathering, and whatever else comes to mind to get a result we're happy with. As usual, our work will be done using oils.

This first post will be rather short, as it will just cover the work needed to get us to the actual painting process. Let's go!

First off, here is the figure's box:

While this figure is a little on the older side, I think it's aged well; it's been sitting on my shelf for some time, and I'm very excited to be finally taking this thing on.


Initial Prep
First off, after unboxing the figure, I washed each piece thoroughly with some soap and water. This helps prepare the surface for priming. It essentially makes sure the surface is free of any grease, oils, mold release or any other surface artifacts from the casting process. This allows the primer to stick to the surface much more easily - especially if you are going to be using brush on primer for certain parts. I used an old toothbrush to do the actual scrubbing. Here are all the parts after cleaning:

(And yes, even the small pieces in the plastic bags where cleaned as well)

Once the parts were washed and dried, The next step was performing any needed sanding, drilling, pinning etc. prior to gluing any pieces together. As it was an older model, there was a lot of sanding and clean up work needed for each piece. The tools used here were:

• A round diamond file
• A flat, rectangular diamond file
• An x-acto knife

The files are just some basic files I picked up at a local hobby store years ago (I think they're made by Army Painter). Between the two of them I was able to get to any spot that required a bit of sanding without too much trouble. The x-acto knife helped cleaning or cutting off any extraneous metal bits from each piece (of which there were a lot).

Pinning
Even though pinning pieces together can be very time consuming and laborious, it's very important. Not every part needs to be pinned, but there are just certain areas that will absolutely need it. For this model, that included:

• The horse to the base
• The horses neck and head to the body
• The warrior's sword/hand to the arm
• The arms to the body
• The head to the body

Fortunately, Pegaso provided pins already inserted into the horses hooves for us. (You can see this in the photo of the parts above - just look at the horse's hooves). As for the rest, I had to do myself. Basically what I did was this:

• Drilled holes using a small Dremel
• For the actual pins, standard metal paperclips were used. I just unfolded them, and then cut them to the needed length.
• A real pain in the ass is making sure that the holes between the two parts to be pinned are aligned properly. To help with this, I put a dot of black acrylic paint where I want to drill, and then join the parts together. Usually, this will result in some of the wet paint being transferred to the right spot on the receiving piece. Sometimes, it takes more than one try, but you definitely don't want to eyeball this. As soon as you have the proper spot picked out, you can drill the other piece, and away we go.

Gluing
For gluing everything together, I used two different kinds of glues... Where possible, I used 2 part steel reinforced epoxy. For smaller pieces I used regular super glue. The epoxy was used to

• Glue the base pieces to the plinth
• The two halves of the horse together
• The horses head/neck to it's body
• The horse to the base.
• The warrior's legs together
• The warrior's torso to his legs

For everything else regular super glue was used (I personally like the gel form - I think it's easier to work with and be more accurate with).

This step is actually really important, because it's at this point you need to decide if you'll be painting using sub-assemblies or just putting everything together and going for it. There is no right or wrong approach to this, it's whatever makes you comfortable/happy. I'm kind of clumsy, so I prefer sub-assemblies because it is much easier for me to get into potentially smaller areas of the model, and also less chance I get paint on already finished parts. However, the downside is putting everything together after it's all finished and not making a mess of it.

(One thing I can say, is that this model is heavy - I can't imagine anybody painting this thing after its been completely assembled)

If you are going to create sub-assemblies for painting, it makes sense to give this a little bit of thought as to what or which sub-assemblies make sense. In this case, I decided on:

• Assembling more or less the entire horse
• The warrior with the exception of head and shield
• The head
• The shield
• Some small bits - such as the stirrups, parts of the horses reins, and a part of the sash the warrior is wearing on his waist.

Because of all the freehand I'm going to do on the warrior, I probably should've broken him out into his own sub-assemblies, but we'll see how it goes
Here we are in the process of putting together the horse:

In the photo above, you can see that I basically mix the two part epoxy on a small paper plate with a toothpick. I use the alcohol (that I poured into a little plastic bowl) to remove any excess epoxy with Q-tips. I should also point out, that having some decent clamps can be handy because the epoxy take a little bit to start curing.

Here are all the sub-assemblies assembled:

Priming/Base coating
Now that everything is assembled the way we want it, I next primed and base-coated everything. This is pretty straight-ahead. The horse, figure, and head were primed black and then white using Games Workshop's Chaos Black and Corax White spray primer. Next all the smaller one-off pieces, were primed with Vallejo's Surface Primer Grey. This was brushed on each piece.

Once the pieces were primed, I then proceeded to base coat everything to get everything ready for the real painting - the oils. The process was as follows:

• Figure out what colors you need
• For each element on the figure, basecoat the element using a color that will be a little darker than the actual color used. This will make things look a little more natural when painting over all of this with the oils.
• Whatever acrylics you use, make sure they dry with a matte finish. This is helpful because it helps the oil adhere to the surface better, and it also helps absorb a little bit of the linseed in the oil paint thereby matting things down a tad. (You might still need matte varnish though). The acrylics I used here were a combination of Liquitex Acrylic Gouache and Golden Matte Heavy Body Acrylics, but anything will do.

A few things to point out about this

• If the acrylic base color doesn't quite match the oil colors you'll use, it's not that big of a deal.
• There is no need to worry about being neat or too precious here (obviously within reason). The idea is to get the color on the each element and leave it at that no need to be fancy.
• Based on the point above, this step shouldn't take too much time. If it is, you maybe are being too cautious.

And here is what that looks like:

With all that work done, we can get to the real work of painting this thing. In my next post, I'll be starting the on the horse.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading!

Regards,
Phil

 

[Steve Ski]

First stages are looking great, Phil, Ruck On!

 

[Briggsy]

Now that is a comprehensive introduction for a thread about painting. As always in this hobby it is important to stick to the basics and always good when someone reminds you of this. I know for one I can be guilty of short cuts that bite me later on in the process! I think I'm going to enjoy this thread.

Cheers Simon

 

[Nap]

Hi Phil

Really good to see you in V Bench and a excellent intro post , well explained and good pics to match

That’s a mass of prep to do , obviously carried out well , good advice for the oil painters as well

Looking good so far , both rider and horse is going to be a delight to see progress

Thanks for taking the time with the thread

Looking forward to seeing more ...all those legs scare me ...lol

Following with interest

Have fun @ the bench

Nap

 

[MalcC]

Sounds like a mammoth task in the preparation.

Malc

 

[Civilwar 100]

Great introduction to the first steps that are often forgotten. The detail covered is first class, looking forward to the next instalment.

Barry

 

[gentleman in khaki]

Dear Phil,
I am watching this series with great interest. Thank you for the very clear steps in initially prepping the figure. A stage sometimes rushed through but you always end up paying the ferryman in the end! I look forward to future instalments.
Cheers,
Paul

 

[NigelR]

Great start, thanks for sharing the SBS. I recently started assembling a 54mm Pegaso Napoleonic figure and was so fed up with the poor fit and poor casting quality it went back to the shelf of doom......

 

[clubcat]

An excellent start on a wonderful journey, watching with interest.
Melanie

 

[Viking Bob]

A great intro and painting.

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody,

First, before we get started, thank you all for the lovely comments; they are much appreciated .

As mentioned at the end of my last post, We're going to start working on the horse. However, before we get started, it's probably best if we don't wing it... I'd like to head into this having at least some sort of basic plan. Being that I don't have time to paint the entire thing in one session (which would be highly ideal), I'd like to break down painting the horse in the following steps:

• The rear legs - since most of the rear legs are covered, I can start with them, and experiment a little bit with colors, etc. and it'll be nowhere near as blatant as with the rest of the horse. So in a way, this gives me a chance to almost practice a little bit and get things figured out before moving on to the far more visible parts.
• Front legs up to where the reins divide them from the chest, neck, and head area
• Chest, neck and head
• Tail and mane
• Hooves, horseshoes, and other small details.
• The fabrics, saddle, leather items
• Finally the reins.

Sounds like a lot, but it's not too bad, although it will keep me occupied for some time . The entire horse will be the subject of several posts. This post one will cover the legs, using the right front leg as an example.

Another important thing to have handy is some reference photos of the kind of horse you'd like to paint. I'm going to paint a dark brown horse with black socks. After a little bit of googling, I found some photos that I thought were very helpful. Here are the photos I'm using as references:







The nice thing about having reference photos is that they pretty much do all the thinking for you when it comes to wondering what colors you'll need for your palette. Which leads us to...


Paints & PaletteThe paints we'll be using to paint our horse are the following:


Going from left to right they are:

• Ivory Black from Williamsburg Oils
• Red Umber from Michael Harding
• Permanent Orange from Michael Harding
• Naples Yellow from Williamsburg Oils
• Warm White from Michael Harding

The are a few key points that influenced the decision to go with these particular paints...

• Red Umber instead of the usual Burnt Umber. I made this swap, because I wanted to emphasis the more reddish/orange tones and highlights that you can see in the reference photos taken in fairly bright direct sunlight. As our warrior is also in the desert in direct sunlight, I'd like to keep the color scheme and mood on the warmer side tone-wise - this swap will help enforce that.
• As you can see from the reference photos, almost all the highlights are very orange in tone. While I don't want bright orange highlights on my dark brown horse, I would like to mix a little bit orange into the high light tone to subtly emphasize this. Hence the Permanent Orange.
• Warm White instead of Titanium White - Again, this will help emphasize the warm tonalities of being in direct sunlight in a desert.
• Ivory Black and Naples yellow are fairly standard choices for painting and highlighting a brown horse, so nothing special here.

Here are all the paints and tones laid out on the palette:


In the photo above, at the very top, is each of the individual colors straight from the tube. Below that going from left to right, top to bottom is:

• Pure Red Umber - this also serves as our mid-tone
• Pure Ivory black - this will be used for the socks and shadows
• A mix of Red Umber, Naples Yellow, and a little bit of Permanent Orange - Main highlight color
• Pure Naples Yellow - Used to create our highlights
• Ivory Black mixed with Warm White - Used to highlight the black socks of the horse
• The previous highlight color with both Warm White and a little more Permanent Orange mixed into - this is the final highlight color.

Another thing I should mention is that I don't use white spirit to thin down my paints. If my paints need to be thinned down, I use refined linseed oil. Specifically, I'm using this:


This is refined linseed oil from Rublev Colours. What's nice is that there is a drying additive in the oil, and it allows the paint to dry much quicker than oil paints straight from the tube. This is important, because I more or less like things to be dry within 24 hours or so for adding layers or glazes the next day.. But if you don't need the faster drying time, you can get it without the driers. (Winsor & Newton also makes a Drying Linseed Oil).
This allows me to thin down the paint without actually breaking it down chemically and weaking the paint. I can also add as much linseed oil to the paint as I want controlling things like transparency or viscosity.

I use white spirit to clean my brush, and not for much else. If you haven't tried this approach, I would definitely recommend you give it a try. This is the white spirit I use:



Painting a horses leg
Alrighty, with the above out of the way, we can actually paint. I should mention that in terms where exactly the highlights, shadows, socks, etc. go, I'm using my reference photos, the box art, and other photos I've found online. I'm also taking a zenithal lighting scheme into account.

We're going to start by covering the entire leg in question with our mid-tone. Once covered, I then go back after wiping the paint off the brush, and remove any excess paint. (Do not clean the brush using white spirit for this - you'll wind up removing all the paint.). Essentially you'll have a thin film of the mid-tone covering the entire area. It looks like this:


Next, we'll paint the black sock. Pretty simple, just take our Ivory Black and paint it over the area where you want the sock. First, I place the black paint where I want it like this:

You can see it at the bottom of the leg, just blocked in. Next using a softer brush, we'll blend it in so it looks like this:


Now that we have our sock in place, I'll go ahead and put in the shadows, first by just placing them where I want them to be. Like so:


And then blending them all in:

After our shadows have been placed and blended in, we can move onto the highlights. (I should state here that starting with either shadows or highlights is purely subjective, and you can start with either). Here are the highlights placed and blocked in:

Here are the highlights after blending:

After the main highlights have been dealt with, it turns out there are two more areas that I'd like to emphasize a little more, so I place a smaller, brighter highlight in those areas:

Hard to see in the photo above, but they are placed in the top front part of the leg, and the top side right below the reins. Here they are blended in:


That also completes the leg. I did the same exact process for all the other legs, which leaves us with the next and head area, which will be covered in the next post.
Here are the brushes used for the painting process:


There are two sets here in the photo - the two brushes on the left are the brush I used to place the paint on the model, and the one next to it was used for blending. These were the brushes used for the larger areas. The set of brushes on the right are the placement and blending brushes (respectively) for the smaller areas where a little more accuracy was required. The one thing to notice is that they are cheap synthetic brushes. I can't recommend this enough: if you are going to paint with oils, just use cheap synthetic brushes. No need for expensive Kolinsky sable brushes... save your money .

As always, if you've made it this far, thanks for reading!
Regards,
Phil

 

[Nap]

Hi Phil

Another great post and update , do like your approach to painting , love the horse colour your going for , good references as well

Really good to see the colours and actual palette

Thank you for the time you put into each update

Following with interest

Looking forward to seeing more

Have fun @ the Bench

Nap

 

[Briggsy]

Very interesting and informative which is handy as I have recently started painting horses again. Couple of questions, do you underpaint the horse or go straight onto the primer? Also I assume all the stages above are wet on wet with the oils to facilitate the blending, do you then add detail wet on dry?

Cheers Simon

 

[NigelR]

Lovely work and very helpful.

 

[phil_h]

Hi Phil

Another great post and update , do like your approach to painting , love the horse colour your going for , good references as well

Really good to see the colours and actual palette

Thank you for the time you put into each update

Following with interest

Looking forward to seeing more

Have fun @ the Bench

Nap

Thanks Nap, glad you're enjoying things so far

 

[phil_h]

Very interesting and informative which is handy as I have recently started painting horses again. Couple of questions, do you underpaint the horse or go straight onto the primer? Also I assume all the stages above are wet on wet with the oils to facilitate the blending, do you then add detail wet on dry?

Cheers Simon

Thanks Simon! As to the questions...

• Yep, the entire horse is underpainted first with acrylics. You can see the completed underpainted horse in the last photo of the first post of this thread
• Yes - all the work above was done wet on wet. I try to do as much work as humanly possible while the paint is still wet - even add details. However, once dried, if I need to do additional work in the same area, I'll go ahead and work wet on dry.

 

[phil_h]

Lovely work and very helpful.

Thanks Nigel, I'm glad you found some of this helpful!

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody,

After our last post, we had (more or less) the entire bottom portion of the horse painted. In this post, we'll finish it off - just the horse, not the blanket, saddle, etc.

Keep in mind - the paints, mixes, and brushed used are exactly the same as the ones used in the prior post. So I won't be covering that here. Please see the earlier post for that information.

We're going to paint the neck, head, hooves. A short follow on post will cover the mane and tail. This is going to be a pretty long post... you've been warned .

Neck/Chest
The key thing here is knowing where to put the highlights and shadows, otherwise, we follow the exact same procedure as we did in painting the legs. If you're unsure where they should go, you have a couple of options:

• Reference photos (box art, internet, etc.)
• Look at the sculpted volumes and determine how you want them emphasized
• Hold the figure under a lamp and take a picture - this will show you exactly how the light falls onto the figure.
• A combination of all the above (this is usually where I wind up...)

Also, because it was unclear in the last post, all the work is done wet-in-wet. I'm not waiting for the layers underneath to dry before I place and smooth my shadows and highlights in to the mid-tones.

So, as with the legs, the first thing I do here is cover the element I'm painting with a nice thin coat of our mid-tone. (In this case it's the Red Umber). This is a two step process:

• Apply the paint to the area in question
• Using a clean dry brush, go back over the same area, removing any excess oil. The brush can be the same brush used to apply the paint, you just got to make sure you remove all the paint off of it with a rag, towel, etc.

For some reason, I forgot to take a picture of this step. But, that's what happened . With the mid-tone applied, we can now add our shadows. We're going to take some pure Ivory Black and put it right where we want our shadows to go - just plop it right on top of the wet mid-tone:



Assuming you know where you want your shadows to go, this is a very easy thing to do. There is a little more nuance with the next step - the blending step. When blending, I want to spend more time blending in the direction where it's going to get lighter. In other words, for the deeper shadow, I want to spend a little less time blending, because I want it to be darker. As the shadow starts receding toward the mid-tone (the lighter area), I'm blending more so it'll get much softer. This all sounds fairly obvious, but the direction, pressure, angle and type of brush stroke using to blend can greatly affect the desired outcome and how well your blend turns out. Hopefully this all makes sense. (Some people assume just because they're going to use oils, the blends just happen like magic, but it doesn't quite work that way ).

Anyway, here are the shadows on our neck/chest blended in:


With the shadows out of the way, we can turn to the highlights - this was the Red Umber, Permanent Orange and Naples Yellow mix. Let's block them in:


For some reason with my crappy photos, the highlights look a little bit more orange than in real life. Anyway, let's blend them in:



And here is another shot of the finished area:



With the neck out of the way, let's now move onto the...

Head/Face
The head and face will be approached the same way as everything else so far. However, there are a lot of little details here that we didn't have to worry about before - eyes, nose, veins, teeth, etc. For me, I like to start in a general fashion - putting in my general highlights and shadows, and then once those are in, I'll then focus on each of the detail areas individually. So, in that way, our first step is to apply our mid-tone layer to the entire head:



As part of the head's coat, I want it to have a darker nose/mouth area, so I went ahead and blocked/blended in some ivory black into the nose and mouth area:



After that was done, I went ahead and put the rest of the shadows in face/head area. Again, for some mysterious reason, I don't have pics of this step, so we'll move onto blocking in our highlights:



Aside from the blocked in highlights, you can also see where the shadows where placed. Let's blend in the highlights now:



Aside from blending in the highlights, you can also see that I started to paint in some details around the eyes/eyelid area. Now, while still on the subject of highlights, the black portions around the nose and mouth need highlights too. These will use a different highlight mix than the one we just used for the other head areas. This mix will consist of a some Ivory Black with our normal highlight tone mixed into it, and a little bit more Naples Yellow. The resultant color is a yellowish-grey tone. Let's go ahead and place these:


They might be hard to see, but the primary areas are the tops and inside lip of the bottom nostrils, and top area of the lips. Let's blend them in:



These additional highlights in this area are subtle but make a huge difference. (They're actually look a lot stronger in the photo than in real life).

With all the shadows and highlights in, we can concentrate on some of the details, so let's get the eyes out of the way. Horse eyes are not the same as human eyes, and as such should not be painted that way. Of course, everybody has their own approach here, but I'm hoping to show a very simple approach with horse eyes that will give nice, realistic results (I see horses in person just about everyday, so at least have some idea of what I'm going for ). It's a 3-step process.

Very, very rarely do you see the whites of horses eyes, and then even so it's only under a small set of circumstances. So, for our first step, we'll paint in the entire eyeball with our mid-tone, pure Red Umber. It should look like this:



We're next going to cover most of what we just did with pure Ivory Black for the pupils. I probably made mine are probably just a tad larger than they should be, but I liked them enough not to go back and do them again. Here are the pupils:



The last step is to paint a small light reflex near (but not in) the center of the eye:


One thing I should point out about this last step, is that I waited until the rest of the eye was completely dry (in this case more or less overnight) so that if I messed up the placement, I could wipe it out with white spirit and try again.

Also you can see in the last photo I painted two other details the veins and the teeth. The teeth were painted using a mix of Warm White, Ivory Black, and Naples Yellow. The veins where painted with the mid-tone color, and then the upper portion where highlighted with our normal highlight tone. Trying to use a darker color for the shadows of the veins will make them look very unnatural.

This pretty much finishes off the face.

Hooves
Fortunately, unlike the face, the hooves are very straight forward... We first coat the entire hoof with our highlight tone


We then create some texture on the hoof by places alternating bands of mid-tone and highlight all across:


The idea is to make it look more texture like instead of just a bunch of stripes. The last and final step is the horseshoe:



It's hard to see, but the horseshoe is a small rim of a mix of Mussini's White Gold metallic oil paint and Ivory Black painted in at the bottom of the hoof. It needs to be a pretty narrow or it will look woefully out of scale...

Ok, that's it for this post, next will be the mane and tail, and that will finish up the horse.

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody,

In this post, we're going to continue where we left off, and cover the mane and tail.


Mane/Tail
The mane and tail will both be painted in the exact same fashion using the exact same colors and mixes. Our first step is to cover them using a base tone of pure Ivory Black. Like so:


Since we're starting out with black, we don't need to worry about shadows. So our approach will be to add successive layers of highlights. Our first layer of highlights will be a mix of:

• Ivory Black
• Naples Yellow
• A very, very small amount of Permanent Orange

For this step, we're looking to add light to specific volumes and areas of the mane in general - not individual hairs specifically. It looks like this:


After the first highlight is in, we're going to go to our next highlight, which will be pure Naples Yellow. Here we can focus on both main volumes and individual hairs. The main volumes will be blended a little more (although we're coving a much smaller area than the area covered with our first highlight), and of course the individual hairs that we pick out will be even brighter still. An important point is that you don't have to pick out all of the hairs... just a few key ones. The final highlights look like this:



Granted, because the paint is wet and glossy, things look a little garish right now, and there is way too much contrast between the pure Naples Yellow and Ivory Black. But when it dries, the saturation will die down, and everything will go back to normal. So, with that in mind, here is a pic of the completed mane, and the completed tail after the paint has dried:






With that finished, here are some pics of the completed horse:








Alright! With the horse finished, we're going to move onto the horse's blanket. It's going to be green with a free-hand arabesque pattern painted onto it, which will all be covered in the next post.


Between the last post and this post, if you've gotten through it all, as always, thank you for reading!!

Regards,
Phil

 

[Nap]

Hi Phil

Thanks for the updates , fun to read through along with the pictures showing each step ...one word EXCELLENT

Again appreciate your time and dedication ....I don’t use oils but I’m learning so much

Looking forward to seeing more

Have fun @ the bench

Nap