19 Aug 2022

Another unit of 28mm Spanish

 Yes, in my gradual and partly accidental attempt to create a 28mm Feudal Spanish/Sicilian Norman type army, the next unit on the testing line is some Fireforge Almughavars


I bought these from Dave Thomas up at Britcon last weekend, and quickly put together a unit/base from 6 of the 24 figures in the box, undercoated them in black, did a bit of highlighting in white (a cheapskates Azimuth Spray I guess) then set to work with normal paints and some Army Painter washes.


They have gone together very neatly - every set of arms is mail-clad, which makes joining them to some of the torsos a bit easier as you don't have to get a perfect match with the cloth/tabard guys shoulders.  

Dave From The Podcast keeps telling me Almughavars didn't have shields, but there weren't quite enough left arms on a sprue to do all 6 guys without shields, so maybe I am reflecting the balance of academic views on this (if its about 83% of scholars think they were unshielded, 17% think they were shielded). 


The figures look a bit cartoonish on the box art, but having painted and based them I suspect that impression is down to Foreforge's painters style rather than anything inherent in the figures. 

They came with square plastic bases, but I didn't want to have to build up the baseplate with filler to hide these, so instead pinned a leg on each dude to the MDF base - being hard plastic they were very easy to drill with a pin vise. 


They are also normal sized - some Fireforge stuff is a bit big - and their spears have been made to a sensible non-easily-breaking thickness too, unlike some of Fireforge's earlier Arab cavalry bows, which I have already.


They come with glue-on swords, scabbards, pouches etc allowing them to be well customized 


These were (of course) given the Army Painter effect to leave them with a dirty Middle Ages feel. 


Taking the photos I realised I'd not gone back to do their helmet nose-guards in gunmetal, so that's now been done - just squint and I'm sure you can imagine it in metallic silver!


I also then remembered I had a turntable as well that I bought ages ago - so managed to dig it out and do a few spinning around videos too. Not sure how well Blogger will render it though - so apologies if its a bit crappy.


All in all I am very happy with them, and once the other 18 are done I will have a very nice (and if anything more "realistic" than the box art and unpainted figures might suggest) set of 24 Catalan Almughavars. 


2 comments:

Vexillia said...

Videos don't work on Firefox (long standing bug) but work fine on Chrome based browsers. Could have done with being a bit bigger if you managed that (I know my camera wont).

Madaxeman said...

My old camera only records low FPS video, so even if you click "fullscreen" its pretty grainy.

Porting video from my iPhone is too much of a faff though!

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