The Brotherhood of Venice

Last of the guards are the cavalry (I know right? cavalry in Venice…). I saved these until last because I thought they looked pretty cool and would be quite interesting to paint. Sort of like a treat for completing all the lowly guards. How wrong was I? They were awful and took absolutely ages. The details were really soft, in some cases just didn’t really exist at all, especially on the body armour. The size of them and the mix of metal armour plates and non-metal areas meant that they had to be painted separately. Overall these took about three times longer to paint than everything else.

Despite that, I have still included progress shots. As with everything else, the models were primed black and then given a mid grey drybrush followed by a white, that’s pretty much my standard now for using speed paint. Then I rebased the armour areas with black to complete the base layer

I painted the armour first, More on that in a bit. I painted it with Oily Steel, from AK Interactive and then, as with all my armour so far in this project it was given a 50/50 wash if Nuln Oil and Drakenhof Nightshade. In hindsight I should have done the gold drybrushing at this stage as well. Originally I wasn’t planning to highlight the ridges and detailing with anything other than silver, but I changed my mind at the end.

Once the armour was finished, everything else was painted using speed paints using the same colour palette as the rest of the models. Blue and Brown for Venice, Red and Black for borgia. I also started picking out some of the details on the armour with thinned, yellow speed paint, notably in the armour and it was then that I decided to try something slightly different. I decided to very lightly drybrush the armour with AK Interactive Brass and it actually turned out quite nicely. Unfortunately, the pictures have dulled the shade down so it’s quite hard to see it in the image. But holding them in my hand the brass looks really nice against the steel.