Painting Scheme — Theoden On Horse

I could write some spiel about how much I like this model but that’s a waste of everyones time so lets get into it. I will give the specific paint used, but as with most schemes you can use different brands¹ or slightly different colours without any significant issues.

This scheme took about 3 hours for me to complete, that is only the model itself without basing (that took about 2 hours on its own but that was 99% drying time).

• Prime in a light grey²
• Paint the leather horse armour with Vallejo flat brown, with a very small dab of Vallejo flat red (makes the brown richer) — picture 1.
• Paint black over the scale that you want to paint silver later. Note I missed the area over the back of the horse, behind the saddle, paint this aswell — picture 2.
• Paint Theoden’s armour panels with Vallejo flat brown — these will be gold later — apparently brown gives a better gold colour than black.
• Paint the cloth of Theoden with a 50:50 mix of Vallejo flat brown and Vallejo flat red. — picture 3.
• Paint Army Painter gun metal onto the silver pieces (scale mail, sword etc) — I paint onto the small panels and heavily drybrush onto the larger areas . Such as the scale mail on the horse — picture 4.
• Wash the silver areas with a black wash.
• Paint the leather — reins, boots, saddle leather etc with Vallejo Game Colour charred brown — picture 5.
• Paint the edging of the armour with Vallejo Intermediate Green — will probably need about 3 coats..
• Drybrush the armour panels with Scale 75 dwarven gold — previously painted brown.
• Paint the horse skin³ white.
• Wash the horse skin with a light grey wash — I used about a 4:1 white : Vallejo basalt grey mix, very heavily thinned — picture 6.
• Optionally you could drybrush the horse skin white now, I didn’t but it would add back the extra highlight.
• Paint the mane and tail with a 2:1 Vallejo basalt grey to white mix. This will give a grey mane, personally I like the contrast but in the books Snowmane has a snow mane. I roughly follow the Warhammer Community paint scheme for horses⁴.
• Wash the mane and tail with a black wash.
• Drybrush mane and tail with the 2:1 Vallejo basalt grey to white mix.
• Paint Theoden’s skin with Vallejo Buff.
• Paint Theoden’s hair with Vallejo yellow ochre — picture 7.
• Paint the hooves with Vallejo Buff.
• Wash the hooves heavily with a sepia wash.
• Wash Theoden’s skin, hair and golden armour with a sepia wash.
• Apply a layer of thinned Vallejo buff to Theoden’s face and fingers he loooks a bit jaundiced without this— picture 8.
• That’s the end of the painting bit, he looks fine from arms length even if the photos make the imperfections more obvious. Also I don’t paint the bottom of the models — mostly because I can’t see it from a normal angle, but I take the photos from much lower.
• Quick bit of basing later (Citadel Stirland mud and Gamer’s grass tufts — autumn 5mm) and here he is. Not bad for 3 hours and bascially no layering, you could add an additional drybrushed highlight but I don’t think he really needs it.

Pictures

Picture 1 — This doesn’t look like a promising start, but I promise it gets better

Picture 2 — This black layer doesn’t have to be the neatest, just try not to go over as it’s a right pain to get black off of white.

Picture 3 — Making progress now, half the model is no longer white.

Picture 4 — You can see the difference between dry brushing and painting in the bottom left armour panel. It looks much more stark in the picture than in real life, and will dull down with black wash.

Picture 5 — That green definitely needs more coats.

Picture 6 — Starting to look much better now

Picture 7 — Theoden looks slightly jaundiced now, and his hair is a bit yellow. Trust me a bit of sepia wash and layering will deal with this.

Picture 8 — Finsished Theoden — The layering significantly reduced his jaundice. Now he looks ready to bail out Minas Tirith — Ride, ride to ruin and the world’s ending!.

1 — Very helpful colour chart — https://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/Paint_Range_Compatibility_Chart

2— I used Citadel Grey Seer, but any grey primer would do. You could go darker, but the colours would be different. But most of the colours used would go fine over even black.

3 — Coat? fur? hair? flesh? I know nothing about horses, but I’ve probably eaten some. Thanks, Tescos.

4- https://www.warhammer-community.com/2020/04/16/send-in-the-cavalry-a-guide-to-painting-horse-breedsfw-homepage-post-4/