Further experiments with horse armour

Over the past week or so I have been working upon the next nobleman to lead a unit of demilancers. The last unit I worked upon involved some conversion work on a Perry plastic horse to bring it forward to 1513 by virtue of creating some contemporary horse armour.

Somewhat spurred on by the results from that project I made the decision to have another go but to try a full harness in a slightly different style. Here's the progress so far;

Owing to the drying time of the modelling putty I have had to work on this in four sittings. I started with the frontal armour as I had a bit of confidence from the previous project but this time I modelled a central panel on the chest rather than have the two sides just meeting in the middle, you can see this in both of the source images below.

I also cut off an armpit defence (a besagew?) from one of the German arms in the Perry MAA boxed set and mounted it on the head of the horse.

I found the bow attachments for the armour really difficult to sculpt on the frontal armour so tried 15amp fuse wire on the rear, hopefully it should paint up OK.

Also, note the boss in the centre of the rear armour along with the raised ridge and opening for the tail, I used a boss from one of the helmets in the WOTR command sprue and then modelled the rest over it.

The main source of inspiration came from these depictions of early renaissance heavy cavalry;

Note the armour on the neck and the mix of half armour and cloth within the unit. The second armoured horse head in the boxed set was perfect for this (that was the easy bit!).

This has definitely been the most intricate conversion I have done so far, I shall try my best to do it justice in the painting.

Stuart