Return of the Reiksguard

A few months ago I was all motivated to paint up a regiment of Reiksguard Knights for my Empire army. Unfortunately my enthusiasm waned as I was reminded for the umpteenth time that painting Knights is not as quick as I seem to think that is should be. I've painted well over a hundred of these guys - you'd think I'd have worked it out by now. Anyway, I burned out when they were only half done, and got distracted by my Ogre unit fillers instead.

The Reiksguard got shoved to the side and were completely ignored up until this week, when their partially painted state finally got to me. Well, the first group of 8 of them are now completed.

My first 8 completed Reiksguard Knights

A few sample models, including the standard and musician. The feathers on the head of the musician and the horse of the standard are some of the worst to have to paint in 2 colours. The definition on the top is lacking.

Another sample model. Every guy has a sash, a wreath and some fancy plumes on his horse, and a pennant on his lance.

Some of the shields got a bit of extra colour (the skull was large enough that I decided to pick it out in bone rather than gold). Those models have come out the best, I think.

As usual, I have not yet painted any detail on the unit standard. This is me failing to come up with a pretty design than I think I can pull off. In truth, I'm not even sure this guy will end up being the "main" standard bearer for the Reiksguard as a whole. I might make something bigger if it's going to be at the head of 30 of them, and relegate this guy and one other to carrying the standard for a smaller subset of maybe 10.

I was uncertain about how these guys would turn out, even when they were mostly done. Some of the ostentatious feathers on the models are messy in places, which can make painting them difficult if you want to use more than one colour - working out where one colour ends and another begins can get annoying. The use of multiple colours also made drybrushing the second colour difficult, without making a mess of the first. Before I went back and cleaned things up with a second dose of dark red, I was convinced that this method was not going to work at all, and I would have to repaint them all with only a single colour of feather. The clean-up helped a lot though, so I'm happy enough with how these guys look now. I am still assessing whether I want to go through that for up to 30 of these guys in total, though. Starting to think I might divide that into 3 batches, one group of 10 with the split colour scheme, 10 with pure red feathers and 10 with pure white. I think I'd have no trouble mixing them together in a bigger unit, but it might help preserve my sanity.

This batch of models didn't include the unit champion, for which I am planning to use the old Kurt Helborg model. He's in the next wave of 8 guys, who are also partially painted but will take quite a bit of effort to catch up. Once they're done I will have run out of assembled models and can consider how badly I want more than 16 Reiksguard in my army...

The next wave is on the workbench, including Kurt Helborg the elder, the unit champion.