Category: Painting and Modelling

The Savoy La Marine Regiment

After a fairly long break, a new regiment has joined my 18th century collection. This is the first of the Savoy regiments from the War of the Austrian Succession that will be part of my Fleurian imag-nations army of the same period. The reason for my choice of regiment is hopefully fairly self-evident; the red and green look superb together.

The figures are from the new Crann Tara Savoy range, plus a couple of battalion gunners from Minden Miniatures. The battalion gun is a Minden Prussian 3pdr. I was fortunate to have Dave Jarvis paint the figures, while Mark Allen did the flags, both hugely talented guys. I only did the gun and the basing, which still seemed to take me an age!

I’m reverting to 30-figure battalions for this period, having dabbled with 36s. Lots of reasons; flags in the middle, less to paint (when I actually do some myself), etc, etc.

Some more pics:

 

 

 

 

 

I hope to have another regiment completed over the winter and I’ll be adding a few things myself at the same time, all being well.

Some Progress on the Normans

I’ve now managed to get 3 plastic Norman knights done, representing truly glacial progress..

They’re quite nice to paint, it’s just the very limited time I’ve had to devote to them. So now I’m halfway through the first unit, and at least the leader is done. I am working on the other 3, which will include a standard bearer and 2 figures with their spears held overarm. Then it’s the foot unit, then the other mounted bunch. There’s about 7 weeks until they’re needed, so you never know, I might get them done!

The leader’s shield is a pre-cursor to the eventual Medetian pale blue cross, which I thought would be more interesting as a winged beast in this period. At some point someone married someone, and the original red field became quartered red and black, as displayed by my later Medetian forces. Even when it’s fictional, it’s nice for the history to make sense!

 

Bits and Pieces

Not loads, but a few items were progressed this week. I finished some 6mm FPW Bavarians that were mostly done back in August, which means the Bavarian corps is now complete. 🙂

Also, I painted the Fenris Games treasure chests that will one day be used for Frostgrave objectives:

Next, a horse and limber (Front Rank) for my 18th century Fleurian Legion artillery:

I have also painted a battalion gun for a new battalion that I’m basing, and which will be the subject of its own post soon (I hope!)

Finally, I painted a first Conquest Games plastic Norman Knight for my Lion Rampant force. It was a simple paint job and a nice easy figure to paint, which gives me some confidence that I’ll get at least a unit done for the November multi-player game.

 

I’d like to get a game in sometime soon, so will have a think about what I might manage to get set up next weekend.

A belated start to my Lion Rampant force

August kind of got away from me hobby-wise, with a lack of opportunities to get anything done. One thing that was delayed was making a start on my Lion Rampant force, for which I’d bought the first figures but had barely managed to open the box.

I’ve got a multi-player Lion Rampant game weekend in November, in celebration of Goat Major recently joining the ranks of the seriously ancient. I’m looking forward to this event and would feel a bit guilty if I didn’t bring any figures of my own along so, like others, I’ve committed to turn up with whatever I can get done in time. It’s actually serving as a useful preliminary deadline for Ayton 2017 (we like to plan ahead!), which will be LR-focused and should see a very interesting collection of retinues turn up for a weekend mini-campaign.

My force, with pretty much anything from 1000-1500AD to choose from, is going to be based on the Normans in Italy in the late 11th Century. This suits me for a number of reasons;

  • I’ve always liked Normans, and was painting them in 15mm (TTG figures) over 30 years ago
  • I’d rather paint them than anything more ‘High Medieval’ with all the heraldry, etc
  • I can extend things imagi-nation-wise to cover the earliest Medetians, which I see as being Norman adventurers who decided to grab a nice bit of sunny coastline
  • By adding some Saracen allies I can re-use those figures as natives for my colonial Sharp Practice project
  • Nothing much else really appealed as it’s not a period I’ve ever really considered doing at this scale

After a lot of looking around on the web, I settled on the plastic figures from Conquest Games as the core of my force – certainly for the mounted element. There’s plenty of variety in the box, and enough for 15 figures. I need 6 for a unit of ‘mounted men-at-arms’ (Knights to you and me) and 6 more for a unit of mounted serjeants. I’ll divide them on the basis of how much armour they’re wearing and work out some colour schemes for them.

For now, I need to plough through the inevitable grind of preparing and sticking them together. The lances will generally be replaced with brass ones and I’ll add a banner or two.

First go:

 

My leader with some of his bodyguard unit of Knights:

I’ll come up with a name for him and some more background fluff in due course.
9 more to go, but I might get one painted soon just to see how they’ll look.

Simple buildings for the islands

Now I’m back from my hols, I thought I’d follow up the last post with the other naval game scenery I finished in August:

As you can guess, they’re Monopoly buildings. I picked up a cheap set without chimneys from ebay and have decided on basic clusters of 3 houses for settlements and 2 hotels for industrial or military (ie. when placed next to an airfield or harbour) centres.

A quick paint job and I’ve got 4 town and 3 industrial bases, with enough to do the same again if I decide I need them.

I just need a handful of very simple trees now!

New Islands

I’ve been meaning to make some new islands for my scratchbuilt inter-war naval games, and finally got round to it. I like the all-beach surround look so simply used 2 layers of plasticard, one painted sand colour, the other green.

They’re bare at the moment, but the flat template allows me to place on settlements, fortifications, harbours, troops, etc. I’m thinking that the odd palm tree will make them right for the pacific and the odd deciduous or fir tree will transport them to the Med or Baltic. Buildings are on the way and I’m hoping they’ll work OK.

I think I prefer this look to my older islands (below), which are textured, but the new ones are more ‘toy soldier’ and hit the spot a bit more for me nowadays.

Airbase (why they didn’t pick a bigger island is a mystery!):

Next, a test model of the Mark 2 landing craft. This holds a single infantry base. I’d like to have double the capacity but it would mean landing craft the size of transport ships, and although the scales are all over the place by necessity already, I think that would take things a bit far! A couple of old landing ‘barges’ are in the picture too for comparison. These are smaller and more non-descript but don’t carry the troops very well. I’ll probably keep both types for variety, and now just need to knock up a couple of dozen more of the new style from thin card.

 

Then I think there’ll need to be some action, so I must think up a scenario and plan a game or two..

Insulation Foam Walls Test

I have plans to make some simple ruins for the Frostgrave fantasy game setting, and for other 28mm gaming purposes. I will mix and match between bought stuff (mainly MDF) and scratchbuilt. For the latter I’ve decided to try XPS insulation foam board, so I ordered some sheets in 6mm and 10mm thicknesses to have a go with.

So far I’ve only managed a few minutes with this material – which involved snapping off a small piece from the 6mm sheet and etching some stonework on one side with a biro. This was much easier and quicker than I expected and I slapped on some undercoat and a couple of grey drybrushes to see what it would look like painted.

I’m happy enough with the results and look forward to trying some proper pieces, L-shapes, etc, with the 10mm material.

Before:

After:

I don’t have particularly grand architectural plans, I just want some wall ruins, with some window and door openings and a few partial upstairs floors to get a bit of height on the table. I think I need a quiet Sunday to really get going on this, but that may be a while away as things stand.

The ease with which this material can be carved has given me some other project ideas, so I may see if thinner sheets are available too.

Some Fantasy Dabbling

It’s been a bit quiet on the Medetian front of late, caused by the usual excuses of a busy time at work and lots of other commitments. Still, I’ve managed a few bits of effort here and there – mostly around something new (which of course I need like a hole in the head..)

For quite a while now I’ve been thinking about trying to find a way of playing some fantasy games, based on a party of adventurers and some linked dungeon-crawls – you know the sort of thing. There are lots of games out there for this type of thing, including boardgames and board/figure cross-over games, etc. I hadn’t done a lot of research and was even thinking of designing something myself (and was a bit put off by the idea of having to obtain lots of floorplans or 3D dungeon scenery), so nothing was really happening with this idea. Then along came Frostgrave, which looks very nicely done, and likely to be spot on for me.

I have a reasonable head-start with stuff for this, including winter/snow terrain boards (although I appreciate that you can ignore this element of the background and set your games in any type of setting), buildings (although more on that later) – and lots of old figures from D&D and Rolemaster days.

I had a bit of nostalgic fun looking through these veteran figures from the ’80s and selected the most suitable for use with Frostgrave. They’d need re-painting but doing them one at a time should be quite good fun, so I’ve re-undercoated and re-based some. Where they were slotta based, I’ve done some fudging to get them onto 2p coins. I haven’t decided on the basing style yet, in terms of surface texture and painting, so for now I’m just giving them a smoothing coat of plaster to make things match.

Initially I’m working on two parties (referred to as Warbands in the game), one ‘good’ and one ‘evil’ in style. This is just for fun really, and to differentiate between the figures in a reasonably logical way. I’ve also got quite a few suitable monsters and other nasties that might be encountered, so should be able to get some early games in (when my pre-ordered rulebook arrives) without too much work.

The first few done:

 

Good old traditional adventurer types will fit into the henchmen categories, and a wizard with a pointy hat and staff will always be useful:

A Wizard and Apprentice team:

GW Empire Militia kit bashing. Lots of potential in these figures, from the 12 I had on sprues I’ve managed to make (in Frostgrave terms) 6 Thugs, 2 Infantrymen, 1 Archer, 1 Crossbowman, 1 Tracker and a Thief:

Of which two have been painted so far:

More old figure candidates for a possible repaint (not that I’m really likely to need more, but hey):

Some treasure markers to paint (Fenris Games):

Ideas on scenery next..

 

New Boats from Partizan

In the limited browsing/shopping time I had at Partizan I did manage to pick up a few bits and pieces, including some ready-based S&A hedges and treasure chests from Fenris.

I also added to my growing collection of 28mm boats, with a couple from Empress Miniatures and one from Coritani. Both types are excellent – a bit bigger than the ones I’ve got, and good value too (Empress £10 and Coritani £8). Everything is resin except for the Coritani mast, which is wooden.

I’ve now got them painted up, which was a simple job and done to match my other related stuff. The two from Empress are very suitable as ship’s boats or launches, and the Coritani one comes with a mast and some stowage.

The seats come out of the bigger boats, to allow more figures/cargo, etc, to fit in. Very handy. I’ve also left the mast and stowage loose for the other boat so that I can use them in different ways.

 

I’m very happy with them, they’re handy additions for river and coast-based skirmishes, and suitable for a wide spread of periods.

A Change of Scene(ry)

One thing I’m going to be needing in the future for my colonial Sharp Practice setting is some jungle. Fortunately I have an old, stalled, project to produce some jungle scenery so I’ve got something of a head start. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of work to do.

I’ll be making about 50 bases worth, containing a mix of plastic fish tank foliage and Games Workshop jungle trees. The former are on the bases already and the latter are assembled (although foolishly I didn’t paint them on the sprues first and it’ll take a lot longer this way!).
To get started, and provide myself with a bit of inspiration, I’ve finished a couple of samples and I think they look OK. Some will have rocks/boulders on them as well but this first pair just have the trees.
With a 28mm figure for scale:
Clumps of these bases should provide a decent jungle effect, and I can use taller normal trees behind them to add some height to the canopy. I’m a fan of multi-purpose hobby stuff, so these are nice and generic and might get some use in other scales and periods too, eg:
Only another 48 to go….