Painting Victrix Iberian Cavalry.

So far, my skirmish group of Victrix Carthaginians has been made up entirely of infantry, although I did have a bit of a go with one of the Iberian horsemen when my order first arrived before Christmas. Having reached the fifty figure mark with various types of footmen, I have started preparing some of the cavalry for painting. I suppose the first thing to say about the Victrix Iberian horse is that they are truly wonderful figures, with lots of crisp, easily paintable detail and, just like the infantry, a pretty good range of bits and bobs to make each warrior different in some way to the last. As good as the figures are however, they aren't perfect...

A lot of the horses have those really annoying vacuum forming holes in really obvious places. They aren't massive but you can't paint over them and the only solution that I've thought of so far, is to use Green Stuff to fill them in.

Once the hole is filled, the Green Stuff has dried, a bit of scraping and filing has been done and the undercoat is on, the annoyance is soon forgotten and the painting can begin. As with all my figures, I always undercoat in matt black.

I paint my horses in four stages; firstly, I mix the chosen horse colour with black to make a really dark version of the colour and slap that on fairly randomly. Secondly, I use a big square brush with the actual horse colour and dry brush the raised areas, leaving the underparts and the insides of the legs in the original darker shade. Thirdly, I re-coat all the horse furniture, the hooves, eyes, mouth, nose and mane with matt black and, lastly, add some white to the some of the legs and the pick out the teeth and put a small speck on the eyes. The horses paint up beautifully using this method and I don't bother using any ink wash on the horse itself. Once all this is done, it's time to move onto the furniture. The horse furniture includes the saddle and all the usual tack, including straps around the breast which have decorative tassels. Unlike the horse, I do apply an ink wash to all the tack and other decoration.

The riders are just like their counterparts from the infantry packs and have plenty of weapons to choose from. I've decided to paint horse and rider separately, although this does have problems; like how to hold the figure while you're slapping the paint on. My current favourite method is to insert a paperclip as illustrated above!

Once both figures are painted, plenty of Superglue attaches the rider securely to the horse. I did try using the paperclip cut down and inserted into a small hole drilled through the saddle to provide extra support, but it is very difficult to get the rider to sit squarely on the saddle cloth this way, so I've given up on this and now rely purely on the glue to hold the rider in place.

With the rider attached, only the shield, with LBMS transfer, is left to complete the painting job.

At the moment I'm only planning to paint up six of the twelve figures in the pack, before having a go at some of the Victrix Numidian cavalry.