South America Inbound

 Having been a great fan of the Fighting 15's / former Black Hat ranges for ages, I have had a South American army on the to-buy list for a long time - and with the closure of Fighting 15's, and hence the potential loss of these excellent ranges (unless Ian sells them on) I decided now was the moment to invest in a new 15mm army.

Given some of my clubmates already have Aztecs and others, the one that looked a little left-out at CLWC were the Tlaxcallans - and the ADLG list has some interesting options for the list, even without the Cortez alliance so Texcallan / Tlaxcallan it was.

I've actually bought a shed-load of them, giving me all options (and probably more). but as has been my habit of late I've started with just a handful to try and get a feel for how they will paint. 

 I've ended up with a bit of a mix in real paints and Contrasts, starting with Contrast Darkoath Flesh for the flesh parts giving them a darker skin tone than the usual "Flesh" on my European figures.

These all have white loincloths, and a palette of bold intense, real paint colouurs in reds, greens and yellows (plus the odd blue).

The "armour" is a speedpaint though, the ever-reliable Aggaros Dunes, with a drybruch to pick out he texture even more.

The feathers were basecoated yellow, and they I gave them a "wash" of Contrast Yanden Yellow to give them more texture than the rest of the "clothed" parts of the figures. 

For basing I have opted to only use grass tufts and foliage on my usual Rustons Woodstain'ed Builders sand + drybrush basing, as they won't appear alongside any other of my troops (who all have static grass) - aside from a handful of European Spanish of course.

The aim overall was to make them colourful, but with a predominance of red as this was apprently a Tlaxcallan colour. I may go harder on this approach with the basic warriors I think.

This lot are now intended to be Otomi mercenaries/allies, which may or may not be correct as now Fighting 15's have essentially closed their website its gotten rather hard to identify the castings and match them to what they are supposed to be.

Anyway, pretty much all of these guys have obsidian-edged 2 handed weapons, so they will work as a coherent and discrete set of figures compared to the rest. 

Very pleased how they have come out, and this test batch has made me look forward to - rather than dread - painting up the rest of the army.

Great Big War Wagons

 Having posted some pictires of some rather large 15mm War Wagons earlier this year, now is the time for something genuinely massive - a 28mm War Wagon. 

The orgins of this beastie lies in the game I played against Mark Fry at Beachhead earlier this year, in which he mentioned that he's accidentally acquired far, far too many pro-painted 28mm war wagons and was now looking to offload some. 

A few quid via PayPal later and I was the proud owner of two handily generic wagons, painted far better than I could ever hope to do myself - all they really needed now was some crew!

The solution to that was a couple of sprues of Perry Medieval Mercenaries from a box shared between me and Dave from the Podcast in my ongoing efforts to tempt him into painting 25mm. 

This was enough for two wagons, and these are the first lot of crew, stuck to a couple of sawn-off lollipop sticks to give a genuine wood effect ont the cab floor (yeah sure..).

And here they are in the first wagon:

 Matching the style of the wagon meant eschewing Contrasts for these guys, and it has shown me that perhaps I need to invest in some proper "triads" of paints going forward as the different reds and yellows I own don't seem to have too much difference once they are layered onto the crews' clothing. 

The next wagon is kinda green, so to match that I am definately going to by some new paints as all my own greens are either rather WW2, or are super-bright for painting Chinese and Eastern/Asiatic ancient troops. 

But, for now, I'm pretty happy with how well my guys match the pro-painted wagon. 

Almughavars!

 As the UK has been recently basking in weather more suited to the beaches of Barcelona, it seems a good time to share some "test painted" Catalan Almughavars from the Lurkio range, now being produced by Gripping Beast.

I'd always had a vague idea of getting myself a Catalan army at some point, mainly as it's a fairly unique army with the unique troop type of Almughavar. 

However the large number of Almughavars needed (of course...) don't really morph into anything else, so it had stayed on the back burner for ages - until a Lurkio "almost closing down sale" a while back tempted me  to grab a bargain with 3 sets of 24 Almughavars at a discount price giving me all I could ever need and more. 

And these are the jolly little chaps - rather "hobbity" if I may say, but not without their own charm and looking somewhat similar in style to some of the Baueda ranges too (so maybe the same sculptor?).

A I wasn't entirely taken with the sculpts, rather than paint all 72 in one go I decided to just do 24 of the more static-posed ones, and to experiment with a mostly contrast paints style to see if I could bang them out quickly and be done with them.  

As most of my other Medievals are traditionally painted with black undercoat, I wasn't sure if doing these in Contrasts would work well together with some of my existing Knights and other morphed troops who make up the rest of the Catalan army.

Having tidied them up, matt varnished them and added basing they look OK - this lot are a bit hard to judge in some ways as these are all the static poses, so there isn't much dynamism.

  

From the back you can see the quite nice way the Hardened Leather Speedpaint has worked for the belts to pick them out and do a bit of almost blacklining for me. 

I ended up overpainting some of the contrasts with "highlights" of normal paints too in the end to try and beef up the otherwise rather washed out colours. 

There are people out there who swear blind that Almughavars shouldn't have shields, but there are just too many of these guys with shields to leave the shielded ones out. 

Painting them was a bit of a dilemma too, as the shields are too tiny for me to even attempt any sort of heraldic pattern, so I just went for some simple "Catalan" stripes in the end. 

I'm pleased with how they have come out in the end, as I didn't have high hopes for these guys after seeing the castings - buyers remorse for not just spending the extra dosh to buy the far better Eureka ones I think - but they are decent enough given the price point they were at in the "closing down" sale. 

At full price from Gripping Beast these guys are now about 68p a figure, with the Eureka ones not much more at 75p each, making it a bit of a no brainer to go Eureka IMO

Either way, at 67p or 75p, I doubt I'd have ever bought an army's worth of Almughavars, so these hobbity chaps are as good as it's ever going to get for an army I may only use a handful of times!