28mm Successors: The Companions

Adding to the set of mid-range Hellenistic/Successor cavalry from my 28mm mostly-Victric project, here are some top-of-the-line Companions to give a cutting edge to the mounted wing of the army.

Being the elite arm of the cavalry, of course they all get purple cloaks 

I also used all of the horses with animal pelt saddle cloths on these - that means all of the horse are the same pose, but I find the figures are so dynamic that you don't really notice the similarities in horses. 

Linen armour is whie on a base coat of Army Painter Speedpaint Holy White 

Spears replaced by more robust plastic rod, as was the case with the other cavalry too. 

Animal pelts are Aggros Dunes from GW with brown spots in the main. 

Again as usual I have done the metal bits after matt varnishing to make then shine. 

The middle guy is the commander, so gets a snow leopard pelt as his saddle cloth. Don't tell David Attenborough though!

3D prints - The Greeks

Those of you who listen to the Madaxeman Podcast will have heard us talking about 3D prints a fair amount recently - and in the lastest episode ("Huge Grenadier Hat Malarkey") we even committed to the idea of Tamsin printing off some figures for us all to have a go at painting as well. 

These are the 3D Breed "free" models (STL files to be precise I believe) that are given away as tasters to their range, and come in both 15mm and 28mm styles. Tamsin printed them off for all of the Podcast crew and I've now managed to finish prepping and painting the Greek Hoplites I ended up with, and have taken a few photos of them here:

  These are the beasties in their au naturel purple plastic form, with "supports" still in place. This looks a right mess and a faff, but using a sprue clipping tool (a necessary investment for anyone making plastic figures these days IMO) they did clean up eailly easily and quickly to then undercoat for painting.

And here are 2 of the finished 28mm figures

They are chunky fellows, but I think that is entirely down to the style of the sculpts, as the Reconquer 3D prints were much finer (although made using different technology too)

The figures weren't printed with bases so I glued them to a Commander's 40mm round base and also glued them together as a pair to give them more stability and usability 

The spear of the guy with the red shield is printed, the blue one I cut out, drilled the hand and added a wire spear.

These are the 15mm versions, tucked into some metal figures as extras on commander bases. Again they were glued both to the base itself and to the other figures.

We'll be talking more about these figures on the next episode of the Madaxeman Podcast which is out now and can be reached directly here

Random bits and pieces

 With 2 full armies in the paint queue, I finally got around to tidying up some of the odds and sods that had been cluttering my paint table for, well, in some cases, many years!

The ends results are eclectic, and not all done in Contrast Paints either (to make a nice change!) 

First up, some dynamic falling knights from Donnington's 100YW range, based up as exuberant hit markers 

Next, and the main batch, some 28mm metal knight figures of unknown (ie unpainted on a Bring & Buy) origin.  

I've used waterslide transfer paper and my home printer to make the symbols for the heraldry so that's why they look so precise - my painting hasn't suddenly improved !

Irritatingly a bit of ink wash seems to have congealed on this guy's shield.

They are done up as Spanish Knights, with Castile and Leon heraldry 

And a few other cities and statelets too

I really like these figures - they came with separate hands to mix and match weaponry

One unit is in non-Spanish colours

I've had this guy hanging around for ages, but drilled out his hand and added a Valencian flag 

More weirdly, these are some sort of random armoured horsemen on what I am pretty sure are old Essex Han Chinese chariot horses, painted up as African Kingdoms mounted warriors or cataphracts

The padding really helps create a bright and unusual looking unit. 

I did also add some cotton as  horse-hair style pennants to differentiate the Elite from the Average ones. 

More random stuff to come soon!

3D Printed Elephant & Metal Crew

I've just finished painting up a 28mm elephant printed by Disain Studio ( https://disainstudio.com/ ), which I bought from them at Britcon, and then added to it a metal crew from Aventine Miniatures. 

The pikeman has an "extended" waist as I used 2 thin rare earth magnets to fasten his legs and torso together - partly so he can be removed for transit and storage, and partly as he looked a little stubby. 

The elephant (I think) looks far better than most 28mm "wargames" elephants out there, although I have high hopes for the Victric hard plastic one which I'll make eventually. 

The paint job on the elephant is a standard black undercoat with progressively lighter grey drybrushing. I missed a couple of minor casting (printing?) lines just behind the head, which really I should have sanded away, and so had to paint them out using paint as a filler to make them go away - I don't think they show unless you are looking for them.  

The shield pattern is an LBMS Thracian shield, as the ones I have for some Victrix pikemen and hoplites are way too big for this Aventine crewman. I did also have to bend the Indian mahout's legs a little with pliers to make him fit. 

The whole thing is based on a 60x60mm mdf base, with stained and drybrushed builders sand, and a couple of bamboo plants from a Chinese eBay purchase.

I even created a YouTube video with a load more photos and a turntable view of the finished article which you can see here: https://youtu.be/kuRz7GIOdP4

Another unit of 28mm Spanish

 Yes, in my gradual and partly accidental attempt to create a 28mm Feudal Spanish/Sicilian Norman type army, the next unit on the testing line is some Fireforge Almughavars

I bought these from Dave Thomas up at Britcon last weekend, and quickly put together a unit/base from 6 of the 24 figures in the box, undercoated them in black, did a bit of highlighting in white (a cheapskates Azimuth Spray I guess) then set to work with normal paints and some Army Painter washes.

They have gone together very neatly - every set of arms is mail-clad, which makes joining them to some of the torsos a bit easier as you don't have to get a perfect match with the cloth/tabard guys shoulders.  

Dave From The Podcast keeps telling me Almughavars didn't have shields, but there weren't quite enough left arms on a sprue to do all 6 guys without shields, so maybe I am reflecting the balance of academic views on this (if its about 83% of scholars think they were unshielded, 17% think they were shielded). 

The figures look a bit cartoonish on the box art, but having painted and based them I suspect that impression is down to Foreforge's painters style rather than anything inherent in the figures. 

They came with square plastic bases, but I didn't want to have to build up the baseplate with filler to hide these, so instead pinned a leg on each dude to the MDF base - being hard plastic they were very easy to drill with a pin vise. 

They are also normal sized - some Fireforge stuff is a bit big - and their spears have been made to a sensible non-easily-breaking thickness too, unlike some of Fireforge's earlier Arab cavalry bows, which I have already.

They come with glue-on swords, scabbards, pouches etc allowing them to be well customized 

These were (of course) given the Army Painter effect to leave them with a dirty Middle Ages feel. 

Taking the photos I realised I'd not gone back to do their helmet nose-guards in gunmetal, so that's now been done - just squint and I'm sure you can imagine it in metallic silver!

I also then remembered I had a turntable as well that I bought ages ago - so managed to dig it out and do a few spinning around videos too. Not sure how well Blogger will render it though - so apologies if its a bit crappy.

All in all I am very happy with them, and once the other 18 are done I will have a very nice (and if anything more "realistic" than the box art and unpainted figures might suggest) set of 24 Catalan Almughavars. 

Adventures in 3D Prints : The Reconquer Designs Experiment

 Having tried some scaled-up 10mm Etruscans recently my other dabble into 3D printed figures has been at the exact opposite end of the scale, with some Reconquer Designs (until recently known as Caballero Miniatures) Medieval Spanish spearmen.

These figures look astonishing in the renders, and so I bought a packet at a show and painted some up to match the style of some existing metals I had for the same army 

The Caballero/Reconquer figures are super-dynamic, but these ones came without bases. 

 

After thinking about drilling into their heels to put a pin into them and the base I instead realised that they'd be so huddled together on a 60x40 DBx base that I could instead glue them all together into a single lump!

This in turn meant there was just one "thing" to handle, and it would have multiple points of contact with the MDF base making it far more robust than if the figures had been based "individually"

The paint job is a pretty simple one reliant on Army Painter washes to give them a battle-hardened look

I gave every one a metal spear. Some came with open hands for spears, and others with open hands and printed swords. These were a complete nonsense, and broke as soon as you looked at them so I gave up almost immediately and just went all-metal, all-spear 

These figures are superbly animated, so much so they are a little wasted in this close formation - but being able to glue them together for mutual support did solve a basing problem, and its how I need them to be anyway so it does still look quite cool IMHO.  

Here they are next to some North Star metal spearmen painted in the same style. The Reconquer/Caballero ones are more "normally" proportioned but don't look too out of place. 

They are great figures, superb sculpts - but they do currently come at a price which puts even metal alternatives as a much, much cheaper option (never mind plastic kit figures) if you are buying them printed by a 3rd party. I have no idea how they work out if you buy the STL files I'm afraid. 

They can be bought from Britcon 2022 exhibitor Irongate Scenery in the UK.