A Carolingian army has been sat on the to-do shelf for a couple of years now - I bought it partly to see what Baueda figures looked like in the metal, and partly as I had already bought 1 dozen of their mounted Carolingian archers with a vague thought of adding them to some generic Gothic cavalry and cobbling together a morph army at some stage.
Digging into it a bit more I had soon realised that the whole army needed to be, well, "Carolingian-looking" though, hence the purchase.
Over the past year I'd added some more Forged in Battle cavalry through a few eBay purchases, and that had both bulked out the army and made it harder to begin to paint as well.
However after a road trip to Aachen, seat of the Carolingans and interment place of Charlemagne himself I became inspired enough to pick up the spray can, and to give them a quick and colourful (mostly Contrast) paint job to get them table-ready, in part as I had to paint something to get away from rigging more little ships, and in part as Aachen Cathedral is so fabulous that I convinced myself I didn't need to paint the soldiers all in Middle Ages style duns and tans, as this dude had some style, and also some money to splash around.
The end result is a fairly over-enthusiastic and colourful army with all of the possible options;
These are Baueda - their horsemen don't mix with FiB's very well as the Baueda ones have very narrow horses and V-shaped riders legs to fit on them, and the FiB ones are chubby beasts with suitably arch-shaped riders legs - so the two manufacturers provide (mostly) separate parts of the army
This is the same unit from the back. There seemed a lot of red and blue in some of the contemporary depictions of the Carolingain military I found, so I felt comfortable giving these "better quality" guys a bold uniform red cloak look.
FiB horsemen in leather armour, as Medium cavalry. Of course, LBMS shields.
The Horse Archers - a Baueda special, painted ages ago and now rebased to the same scheme as the rest of the army
Armoured cavalry from FiB (maybe a couple of Baueda boys sneaking in there too)
Baueda infantry, apart from the unit in the centre front, who are FiB with the more distinctive Carolingian helmets. Because the Baueda chaps are fairly non-specific they may appear as Saxons or something at some point in future too.
From the back the Contrast Paint style really shows up well.
FiB Light Horse. I only needed 2 bases, so mixed in a few of the other riders with the Medium cavalry
Javelin skirmishers. Fairly weedy dudes, not sure how long their ankles will survive in-game handling TBH
And, the whole set - 38 bases including Generals. I suspect some Vikings will also freelance as mercenaries at some point when they finally get on the table too.
There are even more photos in the 15mm photo gallery of these dudes.
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