Warhorses - Modeling the Horse in War

I had high hopes for this DVD, but can only say it's an average effort at best. It's mainly due to poor organization of the topics and poor editing. It looks like a couple of friends got together and just randomly shot bits of modeling and painting and threw them together. The main focus on this DVD is converting and painting 54mm Historex plastic horses. Mr. Longhurst's skills are obvious, but they harken back to the "early days" of this hobby when 54mm was the preferred scale and plastic was as common as white metal.I've been painting miniature figures since 1982 and consider myself fairly skilled, but I have always had issues with painting dappled gray horses. Fortunately this DVD does show you how to do this, although in a somewhat disjoint fashion. Mr. Longhurst shows some close up brush work for blending different hues of grays with oil paints. He also touts his "sponge dabbing" technique for painting which is more time consuming than accurate in my opinion.This brings up another issue, Mr. Longhurst's preferred painting medium of artists oils. Again this is reflective of his age and background. In the '70s and '80s oils where the preferred paints since they allowed the artist to create any color from a mere handful of base colors. They dried slowly (painfully slow at times) which allowed the painter to blend various shades or highlights while still wet. They were realtively durable once dry though they had a high sheen that required the use of a medium to remove or else the use of a good flat finish top coat. In short this DVD ignores the fact that acrylics have dominated the hobby since the late '80s and offer a wide range of colors at an affordable price and at low toxicity.The company that produces this DVD, Compendium Films has produced or plans to release several other titles in this series, and the few that I have seen reviewed on Amazon all emphasis the narrow focus of the topics. These DVDs are not good, broad spectrum instructional materials. They are sadly out of date considering that they are all products of the 21st. century. There really are better DVDs for both the beginner and the experienced modeler so buyer shop wisely.

This was orignally purchased because it was thought to be a paperback book. The product information has both a description of a paperback and of a DVD. If you order this item you will get a DVD.It looks like a good DVD, but it isnt what we were looking for.