[Log] Battle Masters Knights - Part 1

August 24, 2015 to August 30, 2015 - Hello! This is my first log about what I have been working on since I took a 4 year break from painting. My plan is to post these updates at least on a weekly basis.  This past week, I spent 4 days working on the Lord Knights (3) and Imperial Knights (9) from the 1992 Battle Masters war game. These will be used as a Reiksguard Knights / Knightly Order unit for the Warhammer Fantasy Empire Army.

Base coat for majority of the models completed.

Preparations

I started work on these models 4 years ago.  I added plastic Empire shield emblems to the knights' shields. For the Imperial Knights, I did not use the cloth-barded horses from the original game (these horses will be used for Bretonnian Knights). Instead, I will mount the knights on the Empire-themed plate-barded horses,

Last week, I took these models out of storage and had to do some maintenance before it can be painted.  I used plastic cement to reattached shield emblems, horses' heads,and horses' tails to the appropriate parts.  Next, I used white putty to fill in the gaps on the bases.  The putty gave some texture to the the base.

Day 1 Painting

I retouched areas of the models that need Black undercoat.  I decided to focus on the horses first, painting the bases with Nutmeg Brown.  That took about 3 layers to get complete coverage.  I chose to base coat the armor using Chainmail for the plate and Boltgun Metal for the scales and chains.

Texture on base is made from white putty (foreground).

That is when I found out that many of my Citadel paints had almost completely dried up in the bottles.  Some drop of waters into the bottles made the paints usable again. While painting, I noticed that I missed quite a bit of  mold lines and gaps. I will try to do a better job in cleaning up mold lines and filling gaps in the future.  I used Liquid Green Stuff as a quick fix for some of the more noticeable gaps on the horses.  First time using the product.  It felt more like thick paint than putty, I will have to get a better feel for that product.

Day 2 Painting

I spent a good portion of the next day adding a few drops of water to all of the citadel bottles.  This should prevent the paints from drying up completely.  For this day, I wanted to paint the base color for the horses' skin.  To make the unit of knights slightly different from each other, I decided to vary the horses' skin: dark brown, brown, and light brown using Khemri Brown, Calthan Brown, and Tau Sept Ochre paints respectively.

Horse skin painted (foreground to background) in Tau Sept
Ochre, Calthan Brown, and Khemri Brown.

The brown colors I was trying to achieve did not came out as intended, especially Tau Sept Ochre where it had more of a yellow color than brown.  At least this is just the base coat.  Hopefully the next layers of paints will make it it closer to what I had intended.

To end the day, I gave a quick base coat of Chainmail to all the knights' armors and weapons. Knights in complete armor are pretty fun and quick to paint!

Day 3 Painting

I finished putting a base paint on every part of the riders. The goal was to paint them to look like "white knights in shining armor." So white is the dominant color.  The red color helps offset the mostly light color scheme and also to keep them similarly themed to the foot soldiers already painted. 

I am quite happy with how the red and white plumes came out on the knights. The different color plumes was done based on a suggestion made by Little Joe from Warseer five years ago!  Though painted not exactly to differentiate the knights among themselves, it does look better than just with a single color scheme only.

The next day, I took time off from painting to clip off some of the plate armor from Imperial Knight horses' mane. This allowed the rider to fit better on the horses.

The knights and the horses are coming along. I am going to work on the riders in the coming days, painting completely one Imperial Knight and Lord Knight before painting the other 10 knights. For the horses I will try to do more research on horse colors and experiment on each horse individually.

Next Log Entry - [Log] Battle Masters Knights - Part 2