A few festive bits and pieces

Over the festive break I managed to do a bit of painting whilst avoiding getting myself any more wargaming stuff (there are 3 armies in the paint queue already...), and also fit in a trip to Guernsey.

The end result is a rather random mix of WW2-themed photos for your delight and delectation! 

First up is a pair of Sdkfz 251/9 engineer vehicles in 10/12mm scale from Redders at Red3. These complement the rest of the German force I painted up last year, and give me some guys to jump out and blast their way through any field defences I might encounter in BKC or O Group.

Next up was a dog-walking excursion to Batterie Dollmann in Guernsey - strangely enough the first time I've managed to get to it on many trips. The restored French 10 tonne, 22cm gun sits overlooking the coast in the nicely restored open bunker

There is also of course also the nearby Pleimont Observation Tower, which I think is open for visitors during the summer months,

The battery is defended from the landward side by a load of refurbished trenches, and what looks to me like it could be a Somua turret (although I've since had it suggested that it's more likely to be from an FT17) dug in as a bunker.

You can get into the turret from the adjacent trench, but as it was about 6 inches deep in water when I visited, there was no "Madaxeman in a Bunker" photo opportunity this time around!

More bunkers make up the complex, overlooking some seriously impressive cliffs. 

The biggest risk now however is not the big guns, it's falling into the well-camoflaged trenches!

Back on the small scale stuff, these M3 half tracks with British crew from Red3 again were a joy to put together - this shows all of the bits, as vehicle is pretty much cast as a single piece, with the turret gunner and cupola all cast as a single drop-in item. 

Using Vallejo Bronze Green as a base coat is pretty simple - and here you can see the cute strips of crew as well all painted up in British Khaki ready to be glued in. 

 

Some weathering and a few stars that I have accumulated over the years - most of these are spares from the Victrix Shermans I did last year I think

And this is the full set of 6, ready to take the Tommies into battle.

  

Podcasting Live from The Winchester !

OMG! I've just found out that some people do actually leave reviews on Apple Podcasts and other platforms for the Madaxeman Podcast!  

I'd always suspected this might be the case, but had never looked them up or stumbled across them before until a new stats package came along :-) 

And, as well as the, well, just quite "nice" comments, there are some absolute solid gold belters in there too - here's just a few of them.   

(extra points for the Shaun of the Dead / Minder reference here!)

Thanks again to everyone who's left a comment or clicked for a review - wherever it's been left. We all really appreciate the feedback, whatever it is 

You can listen to the Madaxeman Podcast on Podbean or by searching for it on pretty much any podcast platform 

The Devonian Classic - 5 Tapas & Pasty Match Reports

Another 5 Madaxeman L'Art de la Guerre Battle Reports from The Devonian Classic, a competition in the west country that was straight outta Brixham - a small town in Devon, packed full of pasties, pirates and, erm.. pubs ? 

But, more importantly home to an eminently rentable community hall, plenty of cheap off-peak off-season accommodation (and of course the new venue for the fabulous Steve Price Towers), and more fish and chip shops than you can shake a stick at - all making it an ideal location for hosting an ADLG competition of the large but perfectly formed variety!

To this event the newly-minted Spanish army of Sertorius came, singing sea shanties and burping chorizo and garlic at all and sundry, towing behind them the legendary BURNING CART OF DOOOOM!!!. 

These five resulting L'Art de la Guerre match reports are your chance to see how an Iberian army does against the Early Arabs, Seleukos, the Mitanni, the Might of Rome, and the rest of the Successors in 5 full-definition, seagull-targeted battle reports full of the usual stuff and nonsense.

Dismounted Companions - or Hypaspists? Figures too nice not to use..

A rather lightweight painting session to share this time, as a set of the rather lovely Xyston Theban Generals and Leaders pack finally makes it onto the internet, based up here as some close formation infantry for various non-Theban armies.

These figures are really animated nicely, and having swapped them with Dave from The Podcast some time ago I'd been trying to work out what to do with them as I was reluctant to lose them in a wall of hoplites.  Eventually I settled on basing them as close formation infantry to act both as dismounted Companions, or as Alexanders Hypaspists (both in their Heavy Spearmen incarnation in ADLG).

This did also allow me to justify using a couple of Xyston mounted officer figures I had kicking around too, and, more importantly, to have yet another go at a multi-layer, grey base + white top layer "triad" type paint scheme to see if I could make white look, well, "interesting".   

And here they are, replete in their white cloaks and petruges.

I've yet to matt varnish the shields, which are gloss to take the VVV waterslide transfers, as it's been too cold to spray outside and anyway spraying 2 bases is a bit of a waste!

Here's the back view that shows the white layering. It's sort of there, but a bit less distinct than I had hoped. Somehow the lighter layers seem to blend into the base layers when I paint them, as if the darker paint bleeds into the lighter ones as I apply them - maybe I need to matt varnish between coats?

Anyway, they do look like boss-level dudes, so I'm happy with them!

Madaxeman.com meets The God's Own Scale Podcast

This week I've made an appearance as a guest on the (increasingly scale-agnostic) Gods Own Scale Podcast, spending about an hour and a half chatting to Sean about all manner of things "madaxeman" and "ancients competition gaming"-related - and great fun it was too.

Sean is an exceedingly amiable host, and in the course of our chat we covered the dim and distant origins of Madaxeman.com (and how cobbled together it actually all is), the back story of how the Madaxeman Podcast came to be, some of my own personal wargaming history, and finally managed a bit of a shallow dive into the hoary old subject of "competition wargaming" - which, given both Sean and Ken "Yarkshire Gamer" Reilly had both put competition gaming into their own "Wargaming Room 101" on Kens last podcast, was kinda interesting to chew over to say the least.

Sean even managed to spring an "I'm Sorry I Think You're An Arse" topic on me at short notice, so that feature can now claim to have been syndicated to another podcast

You can listen to the episode on the Gods Own Scale Podcast on Podbean, or search for it through your regular podcast provider.

More refurbished Medievals

 Finally... the end of my refurb project for Medieval infantry! 

These are a mix of mostly Mirliton figures, with some Essex added in. All of the shields are pinted designs glued onto glued-together double-thickness business card paper and then varnished to seal them. 

There are even some Two Dragons in here as well as a Museum dismounted knight - the eye however is drawn to the shields so the differences in style and bulk are barely noticable (i think)

I trimmed down the cast-on shields for some of the figures to glue on the card shields - looking at the backs of the shields they are less than perfect, but that isn't really visible at all when they are packed together like this.

These are downloaded designs printed onto paper, glued onto the Mirliton metal shields. I didn;t do these as well as some, as I cut the patterns a little too small but the designs are quite bold so it isn't too bad. 

And all of the three sets of designs for the mixed units.  This will mean I can field the rather underwhelming but pretty Medieval Scandinavian army, or a number of Italian medieval armies with all sorts of different (invented!) cities heraldry.

Museum Z-range Camel Baggage Guards

As a mark of how much my pace of painting has slowed, here's a couple of bases (or packs) of Museum Z-range camel archers I must have bought in the Museum sale back in January! 

These guys are the type who appear as baggage guards for a number of Hellenistic and other Roman-era desert dwelling armies, which I picked up as the Essex camels I had are a little uninspiring (to say the least). 

These were undercoated in white and painted mostly in GW Contrast paints with some other colours added for the details.

This shot shows a Light Camel unit using Essex figures alongside the Museum camels. 

The Essex camels are a little smaller, but viewed from wargaming distances and angles the difference is barely noticable 

This shot shows the "old" Museum double-crewed Biblical Bedouin Giant Camel - still a monster casting, towering over the new Museum figures

 

And here are all three in a procession! 

This pair of Mediocre Medium and Light Camels will be guarding the baggage and frightening enemy Light Horse on a table near you in the near future !

Refurbished Medievals in 15mm

 Another project to suddenly stagger to fruition in the last week has been a load of stripped and repainted Mirliton 15mm Medievals - lovely figures that my previous paint job really didn't do justsice to.

This time around they have all been done with white undercoat (Halfords matt white car undercoat) and the main colours have been added with GW Contrast paints for a bit more "ping".

I've also done printed shields - some stuck onto the Mirliton shields, and some just made out of cardboard and cut to shape. These are the results:

All of these designs were found on Pinterest - the "fish" one on the right in particular is way too detailed for me (or I imagine anyone..) to paint in 15mm, however the other two also come out really strongly too. 

The ones on the left are Mirliton shields, with designs just printed on our home printer, glued on with PVA, trimmed with a very sharp scalpel (new blade time!) and then gloss varnished after painting in the edges.  The ones on the right are glued onto cardboard and cut to shape.

These are two bases of Polearm men - the printed out designs are probably a bit too large for the shields here I think in retrospect,.

The pavises on the left here are a mix of pictures of real pavises in museums, and re-enactors designs I found on Pinterest.

I still have a few more to do, but this is starting to creep towards enough mixed units to field a  Medieval Scandinavian army !

15mm Corvus Belli (plus others..) Spanish infantry

 I've owned a DBA army pack sized force of Corvus Belli 15mm Ancient Spanish for many years, and they have from time to time served as an allied command to the Carthaginians - but I always harboured an ambition to extend it to a full army.

With the demise of Corvus Belli as a casting company for many years this was never really possible, but recently I managed to pick up a second DBA army box from a clubmate (thanks Mike!), add in a few more figures from the bits box and some odd figures from Clive's collection that didn't really fit into any other armies, and end up with what is hopefully going to be a viable Ancient Spanish army for ADLG.

These are the new guys:

6 bases of Impetuous Medium Swordsmen

The colour scheme is a bit random, but I've generally tried to get a lot of red, white and yellow as the dominant colours to make them look, well, "Spanish"-ish.

The central unit here is mostly Xyston figures, which look way bigger than the CB guys in the metal, but are not so bad when based up like this.

These guys have been based in 5's to represent Javelinmen and differentiate them from the Warband -types

These are the find from Clive's collection - they look like old Donnington figures, from both the Spanish and the (sort of) Etruscan type ranges.  

The shields are great - far better than I could manage these days - so much so that they distract from the rather old school statically posed figures. These will be the Celtiberian Internal Allied Tribe Heavy Infantry Swordsmen.