Perry Mounted Men at Arms box set.

With the War of the Roses Infantry box set now complete, the figures have been boxed, labelled and put in storage until enough troops have been painted for a battle. Attention has now turned to some Knights on horseback, more lovely shiny figures for the table top.

The horses consist of three parts, left, right side bodies with legs and a head section, the box does give spare heads, some have armour others do not. There are also some pieces of sheet armour that can be fixed to about half the horses too. They were removed from the sprues and cleaned up, not bad really, just where the actual parts are removed from the sprue requires most work. Once that was done I built the horses, again very easy and all goes together very well. I finally mounted them on Renedra bases, some that came with the set and some others that I had spare from other sets. I wanted them all on separate bases and box only contained 8 singles plus of course multiple options.

I then painted the horse flesh using two different colours of acrylic paints freely available at art shops or even at some department stores (photo below). The base colour looks OK...ish, but the magic ingredient, and one that I will add after all the horse furniture, tack etc. has been painted, is the Transparent Burnt Umber ink. This transforms the base colour into wonderful shades of chestnut, the more coats of ink the darker and richer the colour. This is not shown on the photographs as that will be further down the line, but I thought readers may be interested. I won't be doing a how to paint horses guide, I am not skilled enough and you can find far, far better on You Tube.

Next the twelve mounted knights were cut from their sprues, cleaned and then a pin vice was used to drill a tiny hole up through the crotch and a cocktail stick inserted, I know it makes your eyes water at the thought, but no knights suffered during this process honest! I find them much easier to paint this way and am pretty sure lots of you use a similar method. Three of the knights in the set are wearing tabards or livery coats over their armour, which is handy as I can paint them to match the archers colours of the same retinue. Once again lovely sculpts and there are four different poses in the set of 12, all have their left arm across in front of their bodies holding the reins of the horse, with the right arm left for you to choose from a selection of weapons including lances, swords, maces or axes. This of course means each can be made to look individualistic. With a choice 12 heads on each of the three sprues that option is further enhanced. Hopefully you will see all these options as the build progresses.

 Cheap and widely available acrylics and the transparent ink, the latter not so easy to find locally but available online.

The darker coloured horses have had Mocha, the lighter is Burnt Sienna

OUCH!

Well that is how far I have progressed, I will continue to work on them today, as well as more figuring on my abstract map of a fictional Northern England. I hope to show a basic working copy in progress shortly.