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I've been working on painting some black horses and have come upon a dilemma. I've done some reading on the topic and most of it focuses on color -- black horses are, of course, not actually black. They often have brown or grey and other colors as well, and their hair tends to be very glossy.

The advice that I've distilled is to decide on either grey or brown and mix a dark shade down with black until it's very nearly black, and then use that as the base color.

Now beyond that I'm a little bit stuck. I chose brown for one model and made my almost black mixture, giving a nice basecoat. I then took the dark brown color and manually highlighted raised areas and ridges in the flesh with a little blending. I think that turned out nicely as well. As an experiment I then washed one side with Nuln Oil, which mutes the highlight of course but also results in a nice gloss. All of this so far is good -- it leads to a body that looks reasonably convincingly like a black horse (or at least an extremely dark brown one) with some subtle highlighting, but it certainly doesn't pop.

My concern is that if I highlight more aggressively, I'll end up with something that looks quite unrealistic.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you have any tips for balancing "pop" vs. realism?

(side note: I do understand that lighting can make parts of a dark horse's coat quite bright, mostly due to the glossy sheen. Light falling on the model has the same effect (particularly after the gloss wash) and looks perfectly realistic. I'm concerned though that manually painting that on will look very strange)

EDIT:
Consider this model



The horse pops like crazy but the highlighting makes the flesh look absolutely weird to me. It's nearly indistinguishable from Archaon's armor. Other versions of this model painted in a similar style seem to suffer from a similar problem. Maybe you want the horse to look like armor, in which case it's a great effect -- but in my case I'm looking for something natural.

I would use a touch of blue mixed with the black for the highlights to make it pop without going too contrasty. Another option would be to use a gloss coat on the horse and use just minimal highlights. The problem you might be noticing with the above picture is a result of using non metal metallics for the armor and it just looks a lot like the horse. Using either true metal metallics or different highlight colors would solve the issue.

Using Archaon as an example doesn't really work. The musculature on that horse is crazy and super angular, there's nothing realistic about it so go nuts on the highlights.
These dark Riders in order of age are progressively more subtle as we travel through time.
What sculpt are you using?
Personally I like Charadon Granite for black horses.

On a healthy, well-groomed horse their coat (not flesh!) can be incredibly glossy anyway, meaning extreme highlighting to make them pop is also quite realistic.

Even when not well groomed, horses sweat when being worked hard, so a war horse in battle is gonna have a sheen to it.

You're welcome to come by my place and see my horses. Here are 3.5 of the 6.5 we have:



Jedi, the mini-horse is the .5.

Lukka (head down) , looking brown from being sun faded, is actually black. Starbuck, the white and black, did not fade as badly though he still has brown highlights. Aragon, the palomino, when groomed nicely has almost metallic golden highlights, looking like a real life Barbie Horse.

swarmofseals wrote:
The horse pops like crazy but the highlighting makes the flesh look absolutely weird to me. It's nearly indistinguishable from Archaon's armor. Other versions of this model painted in a similar style seem to suffer from a similar problem. Maybe you want the horse to look like armor, in which case it's a great effect -- but in my case I'm looking for something natural.

I agree that the referenced horse in the OP does not look realistic at all. In fact, it is reminiscent of a Cubist painting of a horse. Personally, as I am a rather big fan of surrealism, I do enjoy the boxy, poppy, high-contrast, sharpness of the horse, but at the same time I do fully agree and can plainly see that the armor gets completely lost among the physique. Because of this I would definitely either choose another color or a technical paint, gloss, etc. to the armor to subtlely differentiate it from the rest of the horse.

If you're looking to accomplish a more realistic iteration of the horse's physique, I believe that is actually more of a challenge than to just follow the model lines as it was sculpted. As you can see in the posted photos, particularly of the "short hair" dark horse image, light lays on the horse's coat much more subtlely, which is easier to replicate with an airbrush I think, but if done right the result can be quite outstanding! I'd probably use a drybrush technique for this and maybe very subtle, soft line highlights -- if any at all.

I've always drybrushed my horses. The smooth plastic does a terrible job of showing that a horse has hair all over. Drybrushing gives slight irregularities that look like hair to make up for it.

Black is a surprisingly hard color to make look good. If the highlights are too subtle they get lost; if they're too widespread the black starts looking grey.

For horses, I'd recommend a black basecoat, a VERY dark brown or blue heavyish drybrush, and then very, very sparingly drybrush white on the topmost highlights. Finish with a diluted Nuln Oil glaze (1/1 works well) to bring all the colors together without dulling the white too much.

I remember there being a painting guide (or two) in the old White Dwarves (around #100 from almost 30 years ago)...

I think they ran it again just becore 200. Was a mike mcvey masterclass.

Oddly enough it foreshadowed the release of bret knights!