Assembling and painting Polish Winged Hussars part 2

With the first session having been about trimming, cleaning, assembling and basing the miniatures - session two is all about painting the horses. Every other unit for By Fire & Sword I always paint up the horses for a company (3 bases) in one sitting, and the riders in the next.

With the Winged Hussars however the miniatures require a bit more attention and have more detail that need to be painted properly. I also settled for white horses when painting up my original three bases, the reason for this was that no other combat unit in my army has white horses - which makes the Winged Hussars pop on the battlefield even more. White horses also take more time to paint than brown variations that I use for everything else.

So to maintain my attention and preserve my energy I decided to split up painting the horses and the blankets/wings/everything else between two sessions. I found that this was enough results to keep me satisfied after the first painting session. During the first painting session I also make sure to paint everything else black and  clean up everything so that my next painting session can more straight to actual painting rather than cleanup. The black color also provides blacklining for future steps.

At this point we are still far away from the end result, and it is perhaps the least inspiring step upon which to end a painting session.

The horse flesh is painted like this:

Undercoat (whole model) chaos black
Basecoat: charred brown
First layer: Khaki
Second layer: White
Third layer: Game Color Matt Varnish 72070

The matt varnish here is not to create a matt finish, as the game color matt varnish doesn't do a proper job for that - but it is good for smoothing out white paint in particular. I often use this method to hide brushstrokes or irregularities in the surface that can occur when you paint white.