The Big Little Ships

 Having sworn blind that I'd not get suckered into buying any more ships for Warlord Games Black Seas game (after all, as long as you have a handful of ships for each side, does it really matter how big they are?), I of course cracked recently after seeing a good deal on eBay for two of the biggest ships in the roster, some 1st Rates.

The pair I got were a French and British "Generic" 1st Rate - it seems if you buy a "named" ship (ie Nelson's Victory etc) then it costs another tenner or more than a generic 1st Rater, and frankly neither me nor any of the people I occasionally play this fairly beer-and-pretzels game with would know the difference anyway. 

So, here's one of the two beasties in pre-priming mode:

Unlike all of the others I have, this is a resin hull with metal masts - which does cause a bit of concern about whether they will be more bendy than the plastic ones in the other smaller ships.

Speaking of which, here are all 4 of the sizes of ships I now own - left to right is 1st Rate, 3rd Rate, Frigate and then Brig.  Anyways..

And here is a ship painted up on it's own before rigging. I did the colours much the same as the previous ones I have made, so the key colour here is GW Contrast Yanden Yellow, which gives that great golden hue to the hull. 

And here is the finished (British) article in all its glory.

Given these were such big ships - and also due to my concerns over metal masts possibly bending - I did add some "extra" rigging to this one too - to make it look more busy, and to actually try and use rigging to hold the masts in place (which is what I think it was used for in real life too - which is reassuring if true).

This rather disturbingly annotated picture shows the main extra bits of rigging. Essentially I added two more sets of double-rigging going forwards from the top of the Main and Mizzen masts to the holes in the sides of the ship which the Warlord guide suggests are used for rigging going up to the rear of the Main and Fore masts. 

This sort of anchors the 2 big masts at the back with cotton rigging both fore and aft, which should surely be more secure?

I also found this great guide on JJ's Wargames Blog from back in 2019 which gave me a guide to adding a sort of spiders web of rigging at the back of the ship, which also anchors the Mizzen mast to the horizontal bits that stick out at the rear - so again its structurally beneficial as well as deeply psychologically traumatic and borderline insane to add this stuff to the basic Warlord Gide rigging arrangement. 

Frankly having even as many of these things as I do own is ridiculous given how infrequently we play, but they are just so cool I am sure I will end up succumbing and buying some more .. maybe if eBay throws up some bargains ! 

  

Here's all my Blogger Black Seas content:

• First Steps
• The full how-to guide with tips and tricks
• Third Raters
• Adding a resin-hulled First Rate, and some extra rigging ideas 
• A whole page of these, together with some info on how they were painted and some tips I picked up on how to do the rigging as well.

A small handful of small Samurai

Quite a few years ago I got a Samurai army painted up professionally by Simon Clarke's Lurkio painting shop - the only army in my collection to be painted by someone else. This was mainly as I really didn't fancy (aka didn't think I was good enough) to paint up a Samurai army and do it justice.

In the process of deciding what figures to get painted though, I did buy a few different ranges before finally settling on Old Glory - and in a recent trawl through the spares box I happened to come across a few baggies of Essex Samurai that I'd considered and then rejected for the army. 

Having succesfully added some much easier to paint Light Infantry Ashigaru archers to the army last year, for some reason when I found these actual Samurai I decided that I might actually have a go at these figures too, and see if I could now paint them to a standard which was something even vaguely close to the pro-paint job on the rest of the Samurai in the army. 

And here they are - almost finished, apart from I am still waiting on some transfers for the large banners.

 

From a distance they actually look reasonable IMO - although its one of those "trick of the eye" things that if you zoom in, or blow up the picture too much they can look rather ropey.

The key techniques I used here were;

• Black undercoat, with the armour being done with a coat of Contrast Blood Angels Red straight onto the black. This seemed to give a good simulation of the red lacquer effect that you can often see in Samurai armour in museums
• The "dots" have been done in Skeleton Bone - which has the advantage of not being anywhere near as harsh as a flat white dots would have been. 
• I have also done a few stripes as well to break up the effect, and not tried to do every dot either - often it is just around the edges of a plate of armour rather than at every piece.
• The uniforms are done in solid normal colours to get a good coverage, and look different to the armour effect of contrast on black. 
• I also snuck in a few minor variations of legging and sock colours to make them slightly less uniform - the handful of "military green" belts also helps a lot with breaking things up too IMO.

As long as you keep at tabletop distances the impression is much better as your mind sort of assumes the dots are in the right places as there are too many of them to take in individually I suspect.

Here are some Ashigaru with naginata and a Samurai commander - again waiting for a transfer for his banner 

I followed the "mostly red" theme with them as well.

Here's a base next to a pro-painted base of Old Glory figures. 

The OG 15's are far heftier, as well as being better painted - so you'd really not want to mix them on a sngle base.  But for a couple of units of different status (in a different command maybe?) I'm still happy with how these have come out. 

Yet more Xyston Persians - this time some cavalry

 As part of the same purchase as the Xyston Persin Bowmen, I also picked up some PSC rubbery Persian cavalry. 

I'd actually not checked the packdetails properly, and thought they were a mixed set but it turns out there were half a dozen armoured cavalry and half a dozen unarmoured horse archer types. I already have a couple of units of the armoured cavalry which I use as the Satrapal Guard, so - so instead of cooking up two different formations I intermingled the riders a little to make a rather more random mix of shooting and spear-using figures in different levels of armour. 

As usual with Contrasts, they have come out pretty brightly - even if my painting on these has been somewhat sloppier than for some recent projects given that they will appear infrequently as part of an all-cavalry Persian army composition. 

I have a lot of these units already from Xyston, and so I wanted this lot to have a colour palette that will allow me to differentiate them from the others so they can be used as part of a coherent command. This led to these guys having a lot of oranges, reds and yellows in the mix without being "uniformed" in any way. 

 For a bit of a bish bash bosh job I'm actually quite pleased with how they have turned out. 

FiB Byantine Cavalry

 I've just bitten the bullet and sold off a load of Essex Minis 15mm Byzantines that I've had for the best part of 30 years.  There's nothing really wrong with them, but those Essex Early (Justinian) Byzantine cavalry figures are just so  dammed, well, ubiquitous that I've kinda grown bored of them more than anything else.

Add into that how my painting style has (hopefully) improved in the intervening 30-odd years and the end result has been that I've now embarked on the process of slowly buying and painting up a replacement set of mounted figures for this particular army.   

I've gone with Forged in Battle for them, mainly on the basis that I picked up some Middle/Late Roman almost-Byzantine cavalry a year or so back and really liked how they came out, so fancied adding in a few more from the range. 

And, here they are:

These are pack WE-BE01 "Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Boukellarioi EHC". 

They are billed as a random mix of 12 cavalry plus command, and as seems usual with FiB this means there is an extra command rider (making 13 riders and 12 horses)

There seems to be a bit of a mix of horse poses - not wildly different, just some slight variants of head position - with the standard riders all being the same.

The Command figures are a guy with a windsock standard, a commander with a mace (both pictured here) and a third guy holding a sword aloft, who I have saved for another project TBC. 

As these are being painted for an ADLG army where I'm likely to want to use one or two of these top-drawer units in each of 3 different commands, I chose to paint them up as a "2" and two "1s", so I can differentiate what bases are in which command more easily. 

This is the back of the Commander - the cloaks are done in a couple of Contrast paints, I believe Magos Purple and Shyish Purple - weirdly "Shyish" is the bolder darker colour of the pair. 

The horse armour is done in my traditional style of black undercoat and a Gunmetal drybrush on top. The horses have enough of a raised lip around the edge of the armour to allow a splash of colour to be added - in this case (imperial!) purple. 

You can clearly see the difference in the two units here - one being "blue" and the other "purple". 

This is the back view of the two "red" units - a variety of contrast paints for the horses, including Gore Grunta Fur, Snakebite Leather, Aggaros Dunes and the Warlord Contrast of Holy White on the grey horse. 

The straps were done in Warlord Leather, with a bit of extra "pseudo-blacklining" done with Warlord's Army Painter Dark Tone wash to pick them out a little more clearly - getting the Dark Tone on the armour doesn't really matter, so its fairly easy to flow it round the straps.

The rather spiffy shields are accidental - I used Yanden Yellow on a white base, and the flow of the Contrast paint just created this effect all by itself!

 

 

Xyston Persian Bowmen

 Being unable to resist a bargain, I picked up these Xyston bowmen in a tabletop sale at the recent 1-day ADLG event in Reading.   

They are from the time when PSC were re-casting Xyston figures in Siocast rubbery resin (an experiment which by all accounts seems to have now run its course FWIW).

I reckon that Persians and other "Eastern" armies are perfect to get the best out of Contrast Paints, and these chaps have certainly come out pretty well both in terms of the vibrant "silk-like" colours and also with how the paint has flowed into the deep lines cast into the design of the figures 

Its most noticable from the back, where the leather armour comes up a real treat with a coat of Aggaros Dunes on a white undercoat base layer

With ADLG units being 6/base, this set of 16 also allowed me to eke out two units of light foot archers too

Looking at the army list I'm now not entirely sure where these guys will fit in, but I believe that some of the Successor armies get the odd Persian peasant archer unit too so I'm sure they will make an appearance some day. 

Lots of big moustaches!

My existing Persian infantry are Museum Z-Sculpts, which look great when ranked up in a dense formation but actually don't really stand up especially well when compared directly to the equivalent Xyston sculpts one-to-one

The Museum chaps are at the front, and are noticably slighter in build

More significantly however, the level of detail on the Museum castings is far shallower than on the Xyston sculpts, such that after even a thin layer of sprayed-on white base coat the detail on the Museum figures struggles to take the Contrast paints - whereas the exaggerated depths of the Xyston figures really allow this style of painting to "ping" 

It's not terminal - I'll still happily mix these in the same army, and same unit as well - but it is a reminder that different styles of sculpting work better with different paint techniques.