Painting Horses

A few general guidelines:

When painting units of Knights for the Knightly Orders, it is generally a good idea to paint all of the horses the same basic colour scheme. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't have some variation on each horse. You should. You can give the horses different stockings, blazes, etc., to make them individuals. This goes for all organized, regular cavalry units.
When painting the horses of such units as Kislev Horse Archers, Reavers, etc., I will paint them with more variation in the horse colouration. The Kislevs look very good on paints, pintos, and piebalds.

For the different colours of horses, here are some guidelines:

Paliminos: Use a base coat of a mix of leprous brown, sunburst yellow, and skull white. Shadow with leprous brown, and highlight with a mix of the base coat with more skull white added to it.
Chestnuts: On these I usually just paint a base coat of Bleached Bone and use Chestnut Ink over it. This gives me instant shadowing. To do highlights, just add some Chestnut Ink to some Bleached Bone, and drybrush the highlights. I like to give chestnuts very dark manes and tales, but a little variety here can look very good.
Greys: Paint the basecoat very light grey, make up a medium toned blue-grey wash to wash over them, then make up a darker wash to get down into the deepest recesses with. Greys look good with either very pale grey, almost white manes and tales, or black ones. They also look good with dark grey stockings.
Bays: I usually mix a bay colour using Snakebite Leather, Leprous Brown, and a touch of orange. Over this I use a wash of orange and brown for shadowing. Highlight by adding Leprous Brown and Skull White to the base coat.
Dapple Greys: Paint as you would for greys, but add very light round dapples of very thin Skull White. You want these to be almost translucent, just a slight lightening of the grey.
Blacks: Never, never paint blacks with straight Chaos Black! Add some white to it to give you a charcoal colour. I also like to add just a touch of Blue Ink to my base colour. Highlight with Shadow Grey that's had a touch of Blue Ink added. Keep your highlights very subdued. Blacks can look good with either white or grey manes. Blazes and white stockings look very good on blacks.
Roans: Roans can be painted very effectively by mixing Vermin Brown with a little Red Gore. Shadow with a darker mix of this colour, adding a little Scorched Brown to the mix. Highlight with Snakebite Leather with a little Red Gore added.
Paints: Paint the horse white, with just a touch of Ghostly Grey added. I actually like to use a 50/50 mix of Skull White and Bleached Bone, with just a touch of Grey for white horse hair. After you've painted the base coat, paint large patterns of the Roan colour from above. You always shadow white areas with a light blue-grey. Never use black. The Roan areas can be shadowed and highlighted as for the Roan.
Pintos: Paint it the same as you would the paint, but replace the roan colour with Bestial Brown or dark earth. Pintos can very widely in colouration.
Piebalds: Paint as per the paint, but replace the roan colour with the same mix as you would use for the blacks.
White Horses: Base coat with a 50/50 mix of Skull White and Bleached Bone, with just a tough of grey. Shadow with a blue-grey mix, and highlight with Skull White.
Browns: Bestial Brown, shadowed with Scorched Brown, and highlighed with Snakebite Leather with Bestial Brown added.

Head Markings:

A star is made using the mix for a white horse and it is basically a diamond shaped spot on the forehead between the eyes.
A snip is a triangular marking with the point going up from the muzzle. This is a very small marking on the very end of the muzzle between the nostriles.
A long snip is just a snip that continues up the muzzle almost to the eyes.
A stripe is a line of colour, usually white, that will come all the way down the muzzle from between the ears to between the nostrils.
A blaze is just a wide stripe.
A white muzzle is where the hair around the nostrils and the very tip of the muzzle are as per the mix for the white horse.
A white face or an oxhead is where the whole top half of the head is white from above the eyes down to the muzzle. The muzzle should be painted a mix of Bleached Bone, Elf Flesh, and just a dot of red to make it a little pinkish.
Melee mouth, or melee muzzle. This is where the muzzle end of the head is a colour somewhat like oatmeal. You can mix this colour by using Bleached Bone with just a touch of grey added.

Limb markings:

Sometimes a horse just above the hoof will have a thin line of white hair with black dots of hair in it. This is called Ermine.
Postern. This is a very short sock, just above the hoof. It does not extend to the first joint of the leg.
Sock. A sock is a colouration that extends from the hoof up to just above the first joint.
Stocking. A stocking will extend up the leg most of the length of the calf to almost the knee area.
A leg marking is a colouration that extends from the hoof up at least 2/3 the length of the leg.
Very rarely, a horse will have what looks like zebra markings somewhere on its leg, but this is very reare and usually only in brown or bay horses.

Hooves:

To do a white hoof, you first paint the hoof Skull White, and then do a very, very thin wash, actually more like a glaze, of grey with a little blue added.
Striped. First paint the hoof Bleached Bone, then paint vertical stripes of Brown or Black. You want to do these stripes as almost a drybrushing, letting streaks of the Bleached Bone show through.
Black hooves are not truly black. They are more a blue-black. You can obtain this colour by first painting the hoof Chaos Black, and then very lightly doing a very thin glaze of blue ink over it.
The colour of a horse's hoof is very dependent on the colour of the horse's leg. A black leg will never have a white hoof, and a white leg will never have a black hoof. The other colours could have either white or black hooves, and striped hooves will appear on all colours of horses' legs, no matter what the colour of the stocking or other marking.
Often on the lighter coloured horses like bays, you might have a horse with one or two white stockings, leading into black markings on the legs, or you might have black stockings or legs on the horse. Bays are often cruse-marked, which means they have black mane and tail, connected by a black line down their spine, and another black line will extend across their shoulders at the base of the main.

I would advise anyone painting horses to check out magazines such as American Horseman, Equistrian Quarterly, etc., and books that you can find at any good library on the different breeds of horses. Another good reference would be military history books that show pictures of the famous cavalry regiments. From these you can see how the different regiments strove for uniformity in the colour of their horses. Quite often, no matter what the colour of the horses in the regiment, the standard bearer and musician would be mounted on greys to set them apart so the rest of the regiment could always spot them and get whatever signals their leaders were giving out for maneuvering.

Back to Painting and Modeling Hints and Tips