'Flight' from Millsy: Castasus Captain on Pegasus

My submission for the Flight Bonus Round is an addition to my Warhammer Fantasy Empire army. As you can see it's a hero mounted on a pegasus, oft times referred to as a "captasus" by the Warhammer community, an odd mash-up of "pegasus" and "captain". Like all the models in my army its a metal Citadel miniature from the early 90s, carefully stripped and reassembled after he was given to me by EvanH, having spent a number or years in his garage.

It would be fair to say I have a love / hate relationship with this model. I knew in advance it would be a trial to paint and it didn't disappoint. I had to paint in three parts as I knew it would be impossible to paint when assembled as it is quite top-heavy and a lot of the detail would be have been obscured or difficult to access.

The pegasus itself was a fun paint. I decided not to paint a grey / white one as you see a lot of these going around and I opted instead for a brown. That gave me the opportunity to use a warm palette for the feathers, starting with the body colour and fading out through a sandy brown to a buff at the win tips.

The seat / saddle is an extravagant piece and I couldn't resist going for a baroque look given the ornate nature and padded seat. It was quite difficult to paint as there's no easy way to hold or mount it so I ended up flipping in back an forth, painting it laying down on a clean plastic lid. The detail required a lot of very fine brushwork to bring out the relief and I'm quite happy with the end result even if it will be obscured by the rider.

When it came to the rider I used the same method for painting it on a plastic lid. He's painted in the colours of the city-state of Carroburg, home of the (in)famous Greatswords I've just finished painting. The banner is from the interwebs, repainted to tie the colours more closely to the rider. The original imagery from Games Workshop never portrayed him with a shield and I'm still tossing up whether to add one.

Assembling the model is where it really started to drive me nuts. The saddle would not sit straight and the super glue leaked out and ran down the sides of the mount, leaving a frosted white effect I had to repaint. It took three efforts to get the saddle safely in place and the rider is still not fixed because I wanted to photograph the seat (and I'd also had enough of super glue disasters for one day!)

In the end I'm happy enough with him and he'll be a constant thorn in the side of my opponent's, flapping about and roughing up opposing heroes, wizards and artillery like a good captasus should do.

Cheers,

Millsy