15mm Han Mixed Units for L'Art de la Guerre

With Han Chinese coming out as the most popular army for the 15mm L'Art de la Guerre competition at the upcoming Roll Call event, and with a bag of 48 Museum Miniatures Chinese crossbowmen bought second hand from a clubmate burning a hole in the lead pile I decided to have a go at cooking up some double-based  crossbow/swordsman units for a variety of my Chinese armies.

Here are the Warring States/Han versions:

What I've done here is glue together 2 bases worth of Essex Medium Foot Warring States halberdiers, originally on 40x20's but now on a single 40x40 base.

I've then "dug out" the halberdiers from the base at the back, and replaced them by dropping Museum crossbowmen into the "pits" in the rear base that the Essex halberdiers have been dug out of. 

The Essex halberdiers have exceptionally tiny bases, so it's not that tricky to dig out new "pits" in amongst the existing 3 halberdiers on the front base and drop in (well, glue in) the other 3 guys into a new, denser front rank. 

These halberdiers were painted some years ago now, so I had to mix up a paint to sort of match them as I couldn't find (or remember) the originals.

The newly settled-in figures are then bedded in with a few more dabs of the woodfiller I use for basing, as well as doing the same for the join between the 2 original bases.

Wood Glue on cardboard and wood filler if very, very strong, but for added insurance to make sure the 2 bases stick together I shave off the magnabase from the bottom of each one, spin it through 90 degrees and then glue it back onto the base. This poor unit has some particularly skanky offcuts of magnabase for some reason, but at least you can see that it is at right angles to the bases.

 And Voila (if that's what they say in China) - a tidy little mixed unit, with a wall of spearmen at the front and some rear rank crossbows as well.

The basing isn't as perfect as doing it from scratch I freely admit - but it does save time and work and basing material in totally rebasing everything.

These are WiP shots showing the unpainted guys being dropped in the back rank. 

Sometimes you need to tidy up the extra basing material - see the feet of the chap at thee front 

The Museum Miniatures guys are a little taller, but you can't see it unless you are looking for it. Their bases are also a lot bigger than the Essex guys, so I did cut them down a bit with pliers to fit them in. 

 And this is what the Halberdiers look like on their own.