Then the winged hussars arrived!

I've been trying to keep up with my Warcrow project during this summer. I still have some units from the Hegemony of Embersig pending a coat of paint but as I had a coupon for my local store from a recent tournament I decided to take the plunge and buy the absurdly expensive Black Angels cavalry for my Hegemonians.

While I was painting them I had a sudden realization. I've been painting miniatures for more than 20 years yet I had never before painted a horse. Ever. I've played a lot of games and a lot of armies, but it just so happened that I always played armies that had no cavalry (skavens and dwarfs) or which cavalry was entirely fantastic like the stormcast dracolines.

For the color scheme I went far from the oficial colors and kept to my mostly NMM colors of my conqistadors. Only the horse cloths were done in the prussian dark blue I used for the magician and other singles in my Hegemony. The idea of golden wings was very evocative to me. I imagined these guys charging the enemy with golden wings like literal angels, and thouht that it should be a pretty terrifying proposition for the enemy to stand their ground and fight.

For the riders I did not draw the reflection of their surroundings on the armor like I did with the bucklermen, as I was afraid that it would look very busy and detract from the already super-detailed scupt.

For the horses themselves I wanted to try some techniches to obtain texture. I used a lot of stippling on the grey horse, to give that spotty hair feel, while on the brown horse I tried to play with some shades of syena and dark red progressively turning into brown.