Corvus Belli 15mm Knights

 As well as the Pavise infantry that I posted a few days ago, the main reason for buying the PSC Corvus Belli stuff was to get a new refreshed set of knights for the 100YW period, as my existing set of knights were starting to look rather tired and jaded. 

I'd also seen some of what I think were Corvus Belli castings in Chris Tofalos' army at the Northern League event in Manchester at the end of last year, and really liked the bold and simple painting style, so wanted to see if I could emulate it.

The really weird thing was being able to paint the figures "on the sprue" - not something I'd really done in years, and of course not with 15mm Ancients. The sprue seemed to be cast and connected in "invisible" places on the figure, so that was a good start.

And here they are assembled and based, waiting final touching up (after I spotted the details I'd missed in this photo!)

And here are the finished figures - I've gone for bold, generally single colour quarters for the horse barding, and (slightly counter-intuitively) have chosen not to co-ordinate the shield patterns with the barding. Sharp-eyed viewers will also note the reins are sometimes in colours that clash with the rest of the barding.

Many of the riders and horses are sort of tied together colour-wise, but by mixing it up a bit it I was able to introduce a bit more variety and colour into the unit - sometimes a same-colour shield, barding and tabard combination can look a bit of a wall of a single colour, especially on such small scale figures as these.

 

A couple of the lances were a bit bendy, but I didn't bother with the "straighten them in hot water" thing as frankly any metal lance will bend a bit anyway and none of these were too far off the mark to make trying something as faffy-abouty as straighteneing them in hot water worth even  trying IMO. 

I did use a couple of waterslide transfers I had kicking around in the spares box on some of them - but only on panels that are visible when the unit is together. The horse at the rear here doesn't have a corresponding transfer on its front right panel for example.

They have - as with the spearmen - come out identical to metal figures, with the only takeaway from putting these figures together being that in retrospect I wish I'd based them all a little closer together on each base, such that I could then have glued the three adjacent knight models together into a solid mutually supporting block. 

This is because they do bend and flex quite unnervingly when you pick them up, especially the horses that are only attached to the base by one or two hooves, so I have a slight concern that this may lead to paint flaking or possibly some of the legs breaking off over time. 

That may be unfounded worry on my part, but if all three Knights on each base were glued together it would make it more of a solid lump to pick up and use on the tabletop without any detrimental visual effect as they are pretty closely packed already. 

So, I now have 7 bases of brightly coloured knights looking for a chance to hit the table!