Madaxeman's Wargames Blog: December 2012

29 Dec 2012

Donnington Scots Pikemen in 15mm

Another Warfare purchase was 8 Donnington Scots Pikemen to go with my existing Minifigs Scots musketeers - Minifigs sometimes being a bit variable, and with no pictures on the website I saw these chaps who looked similar and so picked up a set.

Keeping Scotland thoroughly Protestant ...

Some basic tartan patterns using my Tartan guide from another post

Simple but relatively effective

The command figures are generic ECW ones

And here they are with the Minifigs musketeers - marginally taller, but close enough for wargaming purposes - the style is pretty similar which is almost more important

The interest in painting up Scots is not only for our club competition, I've discovered a lot about them from this book I've been reading recently on the whole Civil War(s), which I'm thoroughly enjoying.

25 Dec 2012

Happy Christmas - it's The Three Musketeers !

On a day when everyone gets presents they don't really want and then tries to slope off to think about what stuff they might buy online that they would have actually preferred to get instead of those socks, this post is intended as a timely reminder that whilst there are some figures you "actually" need, some you just, well, "need" even though you don't really have an army list drawn up to use them in, and some that you kinda think "well, I could probably find a use for them and they are quite nice, so as long as no-one notices....", there is a whole, separate class of figures that fall into an entirely separate "lets throw reason out of the window, I just GOTTA have some of those!" category.

And the latest contenders for the Gold Medal in this regard are very definitely the figures in Blue Moon Manufacturing's new Three Musketeers range.

In the French army from the early part of the Thirty Year's War, Field of Glory: Renaissance
allows you to field the Kings Musketeers as part of a tooled up (well, Superior grade) Light Foot unit armed with muskets. So, everyone wants 4 bases of them huh?

The Blue Moon figures however come in packs of 10 - 5 mounted and 5 foote. So, whilst somewhere in Madaxeman Towers a unit of 5 mounted and one pedestrian are being painted, some spare Testudo infantry were quickly pressed into service to add to 4 of the Cardinal's Guard to create the almost-useless unit of 4 bases of Superior LF Musketeers

The Testudo figures - here in the slightly blurred foreground - are a smidge
taller than the Blue Moon chaps, and also styled rather differently to the fairly cartoonish but eminently lovable Blue Moon - but its a very good match at wargaming distances

Where the Blue Moon guys excel however is in their deployment of quite phenomenal Depardieu-esque moustaches ... (Testudo on the right here)

I actually bought the Cardinal's Guard set in preference to the actual Musketeers set as I thought they looked a lot more like the Hollywood impression of the Musketeers. (Testudo on the left)

"Have at you Sir!" (Testudo on the right - although you'e probably picked up the style now..)

They truly are very loveable figures - and in the spirit of Hollywood-ization, my choice of uniform design for this unit was inspired by a classic Hollywood version of the tale of The Three Musketeers!

Blue Moon stuff is also available from Old Glory UK in the UK.

Go on, you know you want some....

24 Dec 2012

New - Donnington TYW Flags

As trailed in a previous news item, Donnington are about to release some new TYW flags, and Damian was kind enough to send me a set of the Swedish ones.

They come as part of a sheet of 16 different flags including both Company and Command flags for regiments in the army of Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years War.

I quickly added a few to my (sorry Damian!) Lancashire Games Pikemen, who generally serve as Swedes in my armies, and this is the result.

The flags are printed on decent paper, and I stuck them together with my usual adhesive of choice, PVA Wood Glue - my carpenter brother-in-law once told me that PVA Wood Glue was stronger than the wood it joins, so that works for me.

The "rocket science" about Donnnington's flags is that they are printed with a larger-than-the-flag guideline, so you cut out along the guideline, stick them together and then snip off the excess on the three sides away from the flagpole. It's not rocket surgery, but it does mean you are gluing and folding a much bigger piece of paper, which makes lining up the two sides a lot less fiddly.

These are from the Red Regiment - which I suspect will be no great surprise to many of you TYW experts out there...The flags are printed with shading on them to suggest that the flags are waving in the breeze, which as you can see enhances what is actually some very limited "bending" of the glued flags in these photos.

The one I was sent was "Sheet 2", however I've been told that Donnington will be selling at least four infantry sheets and either or two cavalry sheets in this range. I did also paint the edges of the flags red once they were stuck together - because of the guidelines this was a lot tidier than with some other flags I've tried this on.

At £5 per sheet of 16, these flags aren't exactly cheap especially given the increasing numbers of free flags out there, but they are definitely better than the quality I manage to produce using my home printer, and are on better paper stock as well -and they may well see action in the new year!

22 Dec 2012

Britannia Miniatures 20m British Leyland- DAF DROPPS Logistics vehicle

At Warfare this year I picked up a British Leyland DAF DROPPS Logistics vehicle from the lovely chaps at Britannia Miniatures - this is for fairly morphable use (as all lorries look alike, of course!) in some of the Force on Force scenario's that require a transport vehicle of some sort.

The shipping container on the back is a separate piece, so it may well also appear as a piece of scenery in it's own right - a useful touch. If you look carefully you can see where I added a strip of magnetic sheet to the bottom of the container, which helps it stick onto the thin bit of metalized card that I added to the opposite surface of the vehicle.

The vehicle was painted in a black undercoat, then roughly done in a thick wash of a Miniatures Paints Dark Sand.

The by-now-familiar to regular readers wash of Army Painter Strong Tone gave it a messy brown overwash, which was then highlighted with more drybrish layers of the original colour, and then some GW Bleached Bone.

The container was done in a similar technique, but I think I used Miniatures Paints Olive as the base colour, leaving the British Osprey helmet-ed crewman in a non-obviously British plain uniform and body armour combo so he could pass as an American if needed. The windows were done in the textbook "bard blue and then some stripes of progressively lighter blues in one corner" technique often seen on miniature houses.

I think it's a great little piece all in al - robust, useful and brushes up very well.

I've got a load more pages with links to all of the 20mm modern manufacturers I know (and an online voting/rating system for the figures) on my website here

21 Dec 2012

NATO armour in 1/300th scale

Just to prove that I've not been doing Xmassy things relentlessly for the last few weeks to the exclusion of painting and gaming, here are some pictures of NATO 1/300th scale armour that I've been working on earlier this year and only just gotten round to photographing.