The Acorn Knight of Bal Timorea

I can safely say that without the Knights of Bal Timorea project headed up by John over at Santa Cruz Warhammer my knight here wouldn't exist! As it stands, he does, and he rounds out the 201st model here for 2010 to boot. The idea is great, get a bunch of people from all over to contribute a single knight, put all the knights together in a huge unit, then randomly pick one of the people who participated to get the whole unit, sounds awesome! This latest post has many of the entries so far in partial stages of completion.


Green is my favorite color, so I knew I wanted this to play a large part in the model. Also I've been reading a lot of Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series (currently on the third book) and there's tons of knights in those pages. One of the (former) kings had this great rack of deer antlers on his helmet too, I thought this was cool and went that route. So with all the green, all the brown, and the antlers, I thought my knight was a little woodsy, and since I wanted there to be no doubt on his honor, I gave the horse a pure white tabbard.


The heraldry was tricky, and there were a lot of people researching their own personal family heraldic colors for inspiration. For me I went again to the Fire and Ice books with their abundance of knights. Basically there was a shield design for anything imaginable; a flayed man, a white sunburst, a fish, a stag, a wolf, a kraken, beehives, scorpions, a comet, a laurel of flowers, a lion, an onion, three buckets...and so on.

That's right, I said "three buckets" as a heraldric shield design. If someone can have an onion or three buckets as their design I thought why not an acorn? It keeps with the woodsy theme and it "should" be easy to paint. Free-handing period gives me trouble, and you would think a couple of acorns wouldn't get the better of me, but they did. I had to stop finally because the paint was getting pretty thick where I kept having to start over with a blank slate.


So there you have it, this fig was fun to paint up but I don't think I want to do another one anytime soon! I now have a lot more respect for the fantasy players out there with multiple units of these mounted knights too. He'll be shipped off to his new home, and take up his rightful place among his rank-and-file brothers, ready to trample and lance the foe!