A New Rabbit Hole

So I've found myself a new wargaming period wherein I have become enmeshed ~ The Wars of the Roses ~ And just to make things even worse for myself I've decided to do this thing in two different scales: 6mm and 28mm.

I decided to order two 6mm armies from Baccus but these seem to be taking a fair bit of time to get here and I'm beginning to wonder if my order has been forgotten. In the mean time I decided to order a Perry plastic army deal. I decided to start by building a Lancastrian army. 

And here is my first small command ~ Henry Holland the Duke of Exeter. By all accounts a rather unpleasant chap. My reason for making him is because I made a mistake when I first started applying the initial livery colours (I got livery confused with coats of arms). To rectify my mistake I did a bit of research and found a solution which ended up with me making Exeter.

To start with I made one of unit of men-at-arms and another unit of bill & bow. These figures are pretty easy to paint and I managed to construct, paint and base two full units in one week. I expect to be able to do two or three units per week if I can keep up the current rate.

This is a fairly small starting point. I've been trying to decide if I should make an army based on a historical force or just paint up random Commanders and their retinues. I'm not sure which way I'll go at this stage.

Anyway, I decided to base the troops onto multi-bases instead of individual figures. This way I can use less figures in each unit and just rely on the unit footprint. I based the units on what I've seen on various youtube videos - In particular 7th Son who kindly gave me his Hail Caesar lists and home rules (based on the Perry's own homegrown lists etc...).

The figures are nice and they look great based in units but there is one glaring thing wrong with them that I have never seen or heard mentioned by anyone: The world renowned English Long Bows are not very long. They are modelled almost as though they are supposed to be short/hunting bows. Scale wise they are about 4 foot long. Far from the reputed 6 to 7 foot length that history books record.

As expected doing the livery is a challenge and the main reason I've avoided Wars of The Roses until now. I was somewhat daunted at the idea of painting Exeter's coat of arms but I tried anyway and the results came out not too bad. I haven't painted this sort of freehand stuff for a long, long time.

The Duke is just one of the regular figures from the Perry Armoured Men at Arms box. I made his tunic/coat with greenstuff. I'm waiting on some metal command figures and cannon from Perry. I might make a mounted and foot version of each commander. But I might not. We'll wait and see.

As mentioned above, these are based primarily for Hail Caesar or similar multi-based rules. But, If I want to play Never Mind the Billhooks I can always deploy them as I have below by just putting one of the men at arms bases together with the bill base. It's not perfect But It is a workable solution.

So this is the start of my newest project. Just like many of my other projects I expect that I'll spend a lot of time painting these guys and then they'll spend a lot of time sitting in boxes and one day I'll sell them all off. I hope that doesn't happen. I hope they get on the table and prove themselves in battle often in up coming years.

No... Sorry, We're Not The Riders of Rohan.

Sorry about any confusion. We are, in fact, The Riders who look a little bit like the Riders of Rohan.

I have an Anglo -Saxon army that can fit perfectly well into a fantasy setting. But to make them appear a little less "historical" I decided to add some "Northern Riders" to the host. After looking at various options I settled on Gripping Beast plastic Goth Noble Cavalry and now I wish I hadn't.

They came out looking fine and they'll look great in battle but the box itself is really very limited with only three horse and three rider poses. For the horses this isn't too bad but with the riders it means that there are four of each figure in a box of twelve. This makes them very repetitive (especially when I have a second box of them to paint).

Don't get me wrong: They came out just the way I wanted and I really like the look of them but I know that the the next lot of figures will look exactly the same as this lot. The rider that's sitting straight looks okay and the guy charging is limited but looks okay. It's the guy with his arm in the air is the real problem...

Again, the figure looks great but it's just too dramatic to have four different versions of him in one unit. To have eight of him on the table (two boxes of figure) will look dumb. The only alternative I can think of is to re-sculpt his whole right arm/shoulder/torso on a few of the figures and that will be a real pain in the bum.

Anyway, enough of my complaining. Here are my Northern Riders who are not The Riders of Rohan (unless I need them to be Riders of Rohan at a later date, at which time they will abruptly transform into the afore mentioned riders). These can make up either one large unit of 12 figures or two units of 6 depending on what rules are being used.

As you can see I tried to make a couple of hero/leaders using the "arm up in the air" torso. One has the sword arm that came with the kit and the other has the arm of an Oathmark dwarf with a big axe.

If you're wondering about the shields I downloaded an image (and, yes... It is a Rohan shield design just like the banners) and worked them to the right size and colour using photoshop. I then printed out a large batch of them, cut them out and fitted them onto the shields. The shield was then given a heavy coat of mat acrylic varnish. And before you ask; cutting out the little holes for the shield bosses was painstaking.

Tiny and Tinier

I've been struggling to get my wargaming mojo back recently so, on a visit to Eureka Miniatures, I invested in some Irregular Miniatures 6mm War of Spanish Succession to try and kick start me back into painting.

I did a couple of regiments of foot and one of horse. I didn't know how to base them and I had no game system in mind. I just painted and mounded them so that they looked good to me. And my plan worked because I did get my painting mojo back.

Each unit has 77 individual figures. Each block has 18 figures and each regiment has 4 blocks plus a command strip. They look pretty nice and they're easy to paint but I doubt that I'll continue with this era for the foreseeable future but I will continue with 6mm.

This unit is the 1st Battalion Nivernais.  I did this unit in 28mm some years back.

The next unit is the 1st Battalion Bourbon.  I did this unit in 28mm some years back too.

This is just a generic regiment of horse.

And just in case you've never encountered 6mm miniatures before, here they are with a 28mm wizard.

Painting these made me drag out my 6mm ancients and I forgot how much I like those figures. So I went to the Baccus website to see if anything caught my eye... And I decided on Wars of the Roses. I've always wanted to do WotR's but I've always been put off by the amount of painting requited to do all the livery and stuff. But in 6mm I don't need to worry too much about that and I think I be able to get a really good massed unit effect happening. So I ordered their two army pack (with a few added extras).

And:

You probably noticed something else in the top photo. This is my attempt at making a 2mm Roman Legion. I watched the youtube series of the new Too Fat Lardies game "Strength and Honour" and I liked what I saw. I searched on line for 2mm figures and found pretty much nothing. I did find some DIY ideas so I began to think...

Here's what I came up with:

A 20mm square of thick card.

I stuck it onto a plastic base with blu-tack.

(The plastic base is just to give me something to hold on to.)

I added a thick coat of tacky glue.

I dipped it into some hundreds and thousands (I don't know what these are called in outside of Australia but they are little balls of sugar usually sprinkled on birthday cakes or used to make fairy bread).

I stopped taking photos at this stage because after giving them a coat of pva glue the turned very tacky and I was going to chuck them out. But they dried very solid overnight. So I glued them onto a 150mm x 750 mm base and gave them a thick undercoat of Vallejo black undercoat. Then I did a bit of dry brushing and a very, very basic paint job. Some flocking and here they are.

And that's my attempt to make a 2mm legion. This method would be a really easy way to make warbands. Just cut out an irregular blob shape, glue it on a base and add the hundreds and thousands. You could easily make a vast army in an afternoon. The most time consuming thing was waiting for the pva coating to dry to a solid consistency. I left it over night but I'm sure if you placed them in a nice warm area they will cure within a couple of hours.

Deadhead Reinforcements

I've added a few reinforcements to my army of the dead. These don't swell the ranks of the dead very much but they do increase their numbers a bit and also add a couple of new monsters.

I added another unit of a dozen Oathmark Revenants. These are great figures and this is my second box of 30 figures, both of which will make up 5 units of 12 figures - A nice core of solid infantry for my undead hoards.

I have no idea at all where this figure comes from. I picked it up from a friend who was selling off some stuff at my club. It was a pre-painted figure on a clear base and is made of soft plastic. I cleaned it up a bit to get rid of mould lines and gave it a quick paint job. Nothing spectacular.

He adds a nice dimension to my deadheads. I don't really have many larger models in the hoard (but I do have a dragon!) so he will definitely add to the army both visually and as a semi-big hitter.

I don't really know how giant scorpions fit into an army of the dead but they seem to appear in a few movies where the dead are doing their thing. This is a Reaper Bones model. I bought this about 12 to 18 months back and found it really hard to assemble. Only recently did I think of a way to put it together and mount it effectively.

It's a great looking figure and I gave it a very basic paint job. But it came out very effective and I'm really happy with it. As I'm typing this it makes me think: I have a few left over Oathmark Goblin Wolf Riders. I might play around with them to see if I can seat them onto this figure. If I can I might have to get a few more of these and do a bit of modelling.

And that's it for now. I've started doing some Goth cavalry which I'm going to paint up as pseudo Riders of Rohan (or something similar).

My Growing Woodland Army

 "Well it's been  long time since I rock and rolled..."

I haven't posted anything here for two months. That doesn't mean I haven't been busy because I have. What has happened is that a huge amount of my time has been taken up with music - practice, rehearsal and performance, and I just haven't had time to post anything.

During my absence I've rebased all of my fantasy figures (about 400+ figures) and painted additions to them. I just haven't posted any of my work.

Anyway... Here are the latest additions to my Faerie Army. I started this army when I first started getting back into fantasy wargaming at the very start of 2020. But I was soon side tracked by all those fantastic Oathmark figures and ended up painting a large armies of elves, orcs, undead and other stuff, and this little army got left behind.

I've recently added  some more satyrs, centaurs, and dryads. They now make up a reasonably sized little army - or at least a contingent for a larger army.

These centaurs are from Eureka Miniatures. They make a nice little light cavalry unit and match the other Eureka centaurs that I already have. They fit in well with the rest of the army. 

The dryads are from GW and I think these are great models. I pondered hard on whether to fork out the high GW cost for these and in the end I gave in because they are really nice figures. I watched a painting tutorial on you tube where a guy painted these figures up in a cherry blossom theme. I liked it so I copied it.

The fauns or satyrs are also from Eureka. I did a bunch of simple conversions to about a half dozen of them in 2020 and picked up some to paint up. Except for the guys with rams horns and the flautist, I can't remember which other ones I worked on. I still have some of them unpainted. I have enough painted up to make two 12 figure units of spears and one of archers.

And that's it for new stuff. I have plenty more recent things I could post but I'm not going to bother going into it. Instead here's some pics of my growing faerie/woodland army:

Goblins, an ent, dryads and a unit of ogres.

A better image of my ent. I made him about 10 years ago when I was sculpting my own figures. 

These are sprites or something (again form Eureka). They make up a nice little unit of light infantry. I'll use them as skirmishers with a magic missile type of attack.

My general and commanders. The moon faced ogress (Eureka), the King of the Forrest (Reaper) and a fairy from I know not where.

Big hitters: Marsh Troll, Jabberwock and Mountain Troll. All from Reaper. 

And that's it. A long time coming and not all that interesting when it finally got here. I hoping I can arrange my time a bit better to keep my posts up to date.

More Orcish Recruits

It took a bit longer than I expected with other things getting in the way, but I managed to finish what I started in my last post. I got most of the Wargames Atlantic Goblin Warband finished, as well as the Oathmark Wolf Riders. I still have 6 WGA archers to go (which are on the paint desk now) and 3 leftover wolf riders.

I did this second lot of wolf riders as archers. I was going to make a few pillion riders with the 3 leftover riders but I couldn't get two riders of fit well onto the wolves. I tried a few tricks but I just couldn't get them to sit right because all the riders have a forward leaning motion and it looked all wrong.

I can either mix the spears and bow together to make generic light cavalry or I can field them as two individual units (one with spears and the other with bows) or as one large 12 figure mixed unit. 

With the Orcs I decided to rebase the ones I did last month and put them all on to single 25mm round bases. These figures don't go together very well in my opinion. Their shoulder sockets look really odd. But they do look very nice when they're painted and that's the more important thing as far as I'm concerned

There are 25 figures here ~ 24 plus an Oathmark figure that I used to make into an Orc Hero/Leader. He's a bit of a kit-bash using an Oathmark body, wolf-rider sword arm & head, a greenstuff cloak with a fur collar and the fist holding the severed head is from the Wargames Atlantic box.

These guys have swarthy skin as opposed to the green skin of my regular Goblins. I decided that these guys are "Orcs" so I can make them a bit alternative (different stats, special ability, or something else. Maybe they can count as Veteran Troops or Elites or Guards... or whatever might work).

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So that's it for now. But, because of this single basing thing I've decided to do this for all of my fantasy troops. I've been thinking of doing this for a while and decided to go for it. I was very conflicted with the multi-basing that I did last year. I like the look of tightly packed troops in formations but it makes these troops much less versatile as far as fantasy wargaming is concerned. So, I got myself a bag full of 25mm round bases and some bags of basing materials and I'm going to start a massive rebasing project of around 300+ figures. Wish me luck and pray for my sanity!

P.S. I'm even considering doing it with my Dark Age Anglo-Saxons too!