Bring & Buy .. & Rebase and refurb!

At the recent Attack! show in Devizes I sort of accidentally managed to buy a 15mm Feudal/Medieval Russian army scaled for L'Art de la Guerre.

It was a bring and buy purchase, and I thought it looked close enough to my own painting style to be compatible with my other Eastern European armies, and also that it looked like it was great value - something I immediately rushed off to tell Jason, who I'd travelled to the show with.. only to find that it was one he'd put on the Bring & Buy himself! 

So, with a transaction which could have taken place in the boot of my car managing also to financially support the DDWG club fund, I now owned a Medieval/Feudal Russian army from Essex minis that only needed a bit of rebasing, a few dabs of paint and the addition of some paper banners to become quite an impressive complement to my existing  Hungarians.

And here they are:

Commanders on 40mm round bases

Heavy Cavalry 

Spearmen

"Guard" cavalry - the elite of the army

Follower cavalry - less well armoured than the others

Light Horse javelins or lancers - these will also appear as Serbian Hussars in other armies I think? 

Steppe horse archers

Russian army infantry bowmen

Axemen (foresters)

The cheering peasants who follow the army

Lesser armoured Medium cavalry.

The flags mostly come from Martins Vexillia site plus some from Alex Flags site

I'm dead chuffed with them, however you’d perhaps be surprised at how little I’ve done to them. 

The main visual differences are adding a few flags, and repainting the spears and bows in a much paler) Vallejo Ochre Brown 70.865, then adding a little black line to delineate the metal and wooden parts of the spears, plus the rebasing.

For some reason (that I don’t quite understand), making the spears and bows really stand out with a pale colour makes a big difference - the spears stand out against what are generally darker figures, and the effect of making them "ping" that results is wildly disproportionate to the fairly limited effort involved.

I've already gone back and done this to a good few of my own armies that originally had dark or dull brown “wood” colours for spears and in every case the visual impact is far more than it feels like it should be.