The Dogs - Spring Clean Challenge 2026

The other of the original Regiments of Renown I wanted was RR10 Elwing’s Guard Cavalry.  These were in the Vinted lot I bought, two boxes of a character and three troopers.  The two characters were the leader and standard bearer.  This gives a unit of eight which is perfect for a standard Heavy Cavalry unit in Midgard. I like the other two characters, a musician and a model initially called the general but later standardised to champion.  I’ll probably pick them up at some point, completist being a strong mental driver for me.

The troopers are painted in a very similar scheme to the Lothern City Guard infantry I’ve already done.  Silver armour and helmets, white tunics and this time black leather.  Shields are a matching blue blend and spear shafts are Beowulf Blue to match.  The horses are the main difference.

Painting Horses

I decided as they were a guard regiment that they would have horses of a matching colour.  I’ve got another unit of Elven cavalry to do so they will get the clichéd white horses.  This regiment will have bays, that is a chestnut coloured coat with black ‘points’.  For the non-horsey this means a redish-brown coloured body and black legs, mane and tail.  This is a very common colour of horse in the thoroughbred population that is most commonly seen in the UK.  As with all horses any colour is usually accompanied by some white bits, normally a mark on the face, between the eyes and also white on the legs, from the hoof up the leg a varying amount.  Usually on at least one leg, if not more.

*** WARNING TANGENTIAL DIGRESSION ***

There are rhymes about the number of white feet horses have such as:

One white foot, ride him all your life. Two white feet, give him to your wife. Three white feet, give him to your man. Four white feet, sell him if you can.

This was perhaps thought to relate to a difficulty of temperament or in managing a horse with lighter coloured hooves, white keratin being thought of as more brittle which can make them difficult to shoe and prone to losing shoes.  This has been proved to be superstition as the strength of horse hooves is related to other genetic factors than just colour.

*** DIGRESSION OVER ***

That said these won’t have any white on their legs.  This is fantasy and elves do have a reputation for wanting everything perfect all the time.

I use Speedpaints a lot for painting horses.  It gives a very quick finish that has some natural variation in coat colour you often see on real horses.  Bay horses have a chestnut coat and black points.  There are five main shades of chestnut.  I won’t go into details as the names used are different in English depending on which side of the pond you are on, and the Europeans use a different scale as well.  All we need to know is that Chestnut horses range in colour from a light ginger to a dark brunette.  Brown is a colour horses can be but this is quite unusual, chestnut is by far the most common.  It is therefore a mistake in the eyes of horsey-folk to refer to a horse colour as Brown, becasue it is probably a Chestnut or Bay.

To make Chestnut I took three redish brown shades (light to dark tone):  Ruddy Fur, Hardened Leather,  and Burnished Red.  These go onto a plastic palette with room between them.  I then proceed to paint the first three horses in one of these pure colours.  I then blend about 50/50 each colour with each other.  This gives another three shades.  Three more are painted.  Then these shades are blended 50/50 to produce up to another 3 shades.  By this point all 8 are painted but for larger units you can change the blend ratios or add a drop of Dark Wood to get a darker tone or Satchel Brown to get a redder tone.  Usually I’d paint the whole horse but as these are Bay there is no need to paint the legs, mane or tail.  These are painted in Grim Black.  Finally a bit of Cold Grey acrylic is blended with a couple of the blended chestnut coat Speedpaints and the hooves are painted with this.  The “realistic” fantasy horses are finished 🙂

Then the base colours were blocked onto the troopers.

You can see on this image I’ve gone for a pattern on the feathers on the helmets.  I wanted these to look like real bird wings.  These guys are Sea Elves so I reasoned a sea bird would be appropriate and settled on the Herring Gull whose wings look like this:

After all the base colours were on I put a coat of matt varnish on using Mr Hobby Super Clear matt spray.

Then I wanted decals on the shields.  I used the nail varnish stamps on the Elven infantry but the painted unit on Stuff of Legends shows an old GW transfer (a white crescent moon).  The standard top features both a sun and a moon so I thought about having both devices on these shields.  I have some sets of the old GW waterslide transfers and picked a white sun and yellow crescent moon to use on this unit.  Sadly they don’t both fit, the sun is very large and fills the shield on its own.  I used some of the crescents on the banner, two on each side, one had to be cut as the edge of the helmet wing touches the banner.

Final stage was to apply the metallics using the same colours and highlights as the other Elves, although more steel/silver and less gold on these miniatures.  Edges and basing texture/tufts as per the scheme.  Finished: