28mm Renaissance Foot

These guys ahve been lanquishing on my workbench for some time now, they got 50% painted before I was oh so easily distracted into doing other things....

Pleaseingly, with the grondwork already completed I was left wit the fun part of finishing off the figures to a tabletop standard. In the group of nine figures are 6 x Warlord Games Landschneckts plus 3 x Warlord Games ECW figures converted to be suitable for my Marian Wars project.

The Landschneckts are five musketeers plus a crossbow man. These were all undercoated white and then painted using a range of paint types and colours, suitably garish in nature and with a good helping of leather jackets etc. The skin was shaded using Army APinter Flesh Tine and the rest of the figures with watered down Dark Tone.

The remaining three figures were two musketers and a pike man, these where  made-up pretty much strainght out of the box. Only real changes being on the pike man who had weapons hands swapped with Wargames Atlantic Conquistadors figures and a hat from the same grafted un the oringal figure's head.

Again these were undercoted white and then finished off in the same manner as the figures above.

All varnished and based as usual.

28mm Gripping Beast Dark Age Cavalry

Its taken a bit of time to build and paint these little guys this week, its been a busy week in 'real life'. So these figures are to be used in the forthcoming 'Battle of Stamford Bridge' in December, to represent the English horse thath was alledged to have been present at the battle.

Completed unit of Dark Age Cavalry

This is my first box of these figurs, 12 in all, each one represented in an unarmoured dress and carring a range of spears, javlins, swords and axes. For the battle I'll add another 2 boxes to give a good sized mounted force for the English agaings their Viking opponents.

These guys will represent lighter cavalry used by the English ad other nationalities. the models clearly do not have any stirrups for the riders and thus cannot be used as lance armed 'knights'

The figures made up well, I actually made the executive choice to replace the supplied heads with Victrix Ango-Dane / Viking heads as I actually like the sculpts better and the helmets supplied with the kit were a little too 'early' in appearance for my taste.

Another view of the unit

I spray painted the figures black and then added a top down spray of white to give a base highlight before setting to with my paint palette. All the horses were painted using speed paints, as were some of the figures. They grey horse had a white dry brush applied and where I used regular paints I applied appropriate washes before varnishing and basing.

Reasonably pleased with this weeks work!

Finally a closer look at the rear rank

Vikings and Saxons, 3D Printed figures

This week I was able to work through a set of 3D Printed figures that I acquired off eBay. They were listed as Vikings and Saxons and were a pretty reasonable price, the sets were Viking Berserkers, Dark Age Slingers and Saxons, 24 figures in total.

The Saxon set

Now on arrival and looking at the figures I was a little disappointed with the quality of the sculpts, of the 10 Saxon figures, there were only a couple of stand out figures - the commander, pointing and the standard bearer. That said after painting the figures - they will all look OK, en masse in a suitable army.

These Saxons are definitely not 'historically' accurate, with somewhat suspect chainmail designs.

My biggest criticism of these Saxon fellows is that they are not historically accurate - they are definitely a fantasy version of a Saxon warrior, with significant embellishments to their chainmail shirts. It is once you start painting them that you realise the limitations of the sculpts and the poor definition on the faces and other details.

The remaining Saxons in close-up

Not showing very well in the photo is an attempt to print a flag design on paper and then attach to the moulded flag, concept good, execution leaving a little to be desired!

As noted the Saxon commander was a nice figure but looking at the above rear view it is very doubtful that a Saxon warrior would be a carrying a two handed sword as depicted on the model.

Victrix Housecarl

By way of light relief I had found a Victrix Housecarl hidden in the clutter of my work desk, so I felt I had to paint him up, He'll be joining his friends to fight the Vikings at Stamford Bridge in December!

Next up was a group of six Dark Age slingers, these were relatively few and far between in the battles that I'm interested in playing but the figures supplied here looked interesting. All my comments about the Saxons from above apply to these!

I placed most of these figures on a multi-base,
the unit included two female fighters and I painted these accordingly -
representing a unit made-up of old and young alike with 

Another view of the slingers

Finally we have the Viking Berserker figures, these all painted up nicely despite sharing mainly of the concerns I had for the Saxon figures. These guys are all bare chested and carrying axes, swords etc. As all of these had acres of bare flesh exposed, I painted them with my usual Army Painter Barbarian Flesh and then used Flesh Wash to add muscle definition, this worked pretty well on all figures.

8 x Viking Berserker figures.

Some nice figures in this set - the Standard Bearer is again somewhat fantasy in origins but the overall feel of these fierce follows seems to have come through. 

The shield was added to a figure that had lost it's arm in postage
and it nicely obscures the missing parts.

Overall, not a waste of time and money but the figures do have some challenges, these chaps will be joining their brethren for the 1066 Campaign.