A Champion for the Knights

When I stated the Bretonnian project, I thought that painting knights would be much like painting harlequins or space marines: doing one would prepare me for the other. Actually, that's not the case. The Bretonnian knights are bigger, of course, and use large blocks of colour (and, supposedly, transfers, which I've not got and have never used). My own feeling is that Bretonnian knights look better when they are painted in very bright, simple colours. I've used red, blue, green, black and the two "metals", white and yellow. Blue/white and red/yellow make for very strong contrasts.

The newer plastic knights have shield-shapes on their horses' barding, which break up the models but do add a new level of fiddly details (likewise the strips of chainmail sticking out from under the cloth). Personally, I like the cleanliness of the older models. In fact, I feel that when painting knights, the less grimdark, the better. No wonder that GW didn't know what to do with the Bretonnians for so long.

A further point about painting knights: once they're in a unit, and because they'll be viewed from above, generally, the colour on the back of the horse's head and its upper body is the colour that they'll be seen to be by an observer. So, if you want a varied unit, that's worth considering. 

Anyhow, I painted a leader for the Battlemasters unit. He's also a Battlemasters model, although he's from a slightly different knightly unit than the other knights. I had quite a job getting him to sit on his horse and some trimming and bending of his legs was required.

The "weaved" pattern on his barding is done by first painting a grid, as I would do for harlequins, then painting in the blue diamonds. Then I delete some of the lines to give an "over and under" look before painting yellow. The shading strengthens the effect that some of the lines are going underneath others.

And here is the whole unit. Charge!