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So I am paying my friend to paint quite a bit of my army, and it's turning out quite like "eye candy". However I am painting my off beat units myself. I am an amateur painter so I except them to look average at best.

Here I have started my Silver Helms unit tonight. I primed them black, then did some painting. I want to do a couple more coats now, and then throw some washes all over the different colored areas. I also have to buy Chaos Black to fix the painting lol errors on mah horse lol. Please let me know what you think of how i'm doing on it so far. And any feedback would greatly help. Also the yellow looks really bright and can't really see any detail on the head of the model, but it looks less bright from painting table distance. It will be coated and washed as well, which will greatly help.

(Heavy WIP, only started this model tonight so don't judge the massive errors )
Here's a comparison to some of my other units that are



Here's some additional close ups of the wip horse

Redoing the chaos black on the horse is really going to neaten that up, as you can just paint over all the bits of paint that hit its skin

I think this is pretty great for an amateur, and can't wait to see it after some washes.

Yeah after some washes hopefully it will darken those colors, to me it seems like you used the highlight as the base coat. Much too stark.

Nice job regardless

They look like they just came from Mardi Gras. It's actually kinda cool, since you don't usually see High Elves like that. My main bit of advice is to paint the gold parts with actual gold paint, especially on the horse. The yellow bits just don't quite look right.

Alternative to any HE paint job I've ever seen. You'll certainly attract a lot of attention with a paint job like that lol.

My only advice is to touch up on the bits where you've accidentally got paint on unintended areas such as the yellow on the horse's skin. Other than that, looks really good.

There is no harsher contrast than yellow and purple, so I would consider switching one of them to something a little more complementary to ease the impact on the eye.
Technique wise, I would advise using metallic gold instead of yellow, it will play with the purple much better. Cleaning up areas that are not thoroughly covered or that have splashed paint from brush misses should be touched up with a 2nd coat to smooth out the color and clearly define detail.

In general though on first impression, apart from the yellow I am finding them looking a bit too much like Dark elves. I heavily associate purple and black with DE as opposed to HE, which have always traditionally incorporate white in the scheme. Granted, you do not have to adhere religiously to white, but despite this I still feel colors often associated with the army's nemesis should be avoided.

That being said, that's just my taste so please take it as personal opinion only. You seem to be off to a good start painting, and I wish you luck with the long battle of painting a whole army!

MajorTom11 wrote:There is no harsher contrast than yellow and purple, so I would consider switching one of them to something a little more complementary to ease the impact on the eye.
Technique wise, I would advise using metallic gold instead of yellow, it will play with the purple much better. Cleaning up areas that are not thoroughly covered or that have splashed paint from brush misses should be touched up with a 2nd coat to smooth out the color and clearly define detail.

Right, they are literally complimentary colours, so purple makes the yellow look more yellow and vice versa. As an alternative to switching out either colour you could go with a less intensely saturated version of one of the colours, essentially a more washed out yellow would really let the purple shine, right now they're fighting for the viewers attention a little.

If you're happy with the colours as they are I'd suggest working a little on your lights and darks. Some of your shading needs to be darker. Where the archers pants meet his tunic for instance would work much better with a deeper shadow separating the two. You need to exaggerate depth in many cases in miniature painting.
On the other hand the contrast between light and dark is too dramatic on the horses mane. There's no need to go almost from black to white here and it really just makes the drybrushing look worse than it needs to. There's really no need to have the value of the "shading" here be more than a few stages darker than the highlight.

I just re-read your OP and realised that you only what commentary on the horse, sorry. Your main issues seem to be neatness, control, and jumping to your mid tone colour too quickly from black. On the reigns for instance, the background to the yellow discs shouldn't be black, it should be your yellow "shading" colour. Working in stages like this will also help your lighter colours cover better when you get to that stage.

Brush size can play a factor as far as the neatness goes, but mostly it's just patience. Speed comes with practice. Honestly I find horses incredibly boring to paint, so if you can bring yourself to take your time and stay "inside the lines" with multiple thin coats of your colours then you'll learn alot about brush control and getting your paint/thinner ratios right.

thanks for the feedback