A fistful of ... Elephants?

A quick bit of just-finished painting today, in the shape of 3 fully-padded-out armoured elephants.

I believe the two outrider ones are Museum, and the one in the middle looks like a Minifigs casting to me.

The Red and White one is painted in normal paints, with the other two having their barding done in GW Contrast paints (Talassar Blue, Yanden Yellow and Blood Angels Red)

The banners are (of course) printed onto normal inkjet paper, varnished and just glued on.

Armoured elephants are a new troop type in ADLGv4, and rather bizzarrely I seemed to be lacking in owning any - so rescuing these three unpainted versions from Clives stash was a must-do.

Fitting all three into one army is a challenge I need to work on - I think there's an Indian army that can have all three, otherwise its 300 points of Ilkhanids or something! 

I'm very pleased with how they have panned out - lets see how they perform once I get a chance to use them.

Rug-a-dub-dub

Here's another refurbished Ghaznavid/Arab elephant, this time with an added printed rug:

The print quality isn't perhaps as good as it could be as I printed it with a relatively low resolution printer but as a test of concept I am still quite pleased with it.

The rugs can be found on my Pinterest page

15mm ADLG Arab army on eBay

Downsizing my oversized 15mm ancients collection means I have realised that I enough spares to sell on eBay a whole "Arab" army, using figures from various manufacturers to make up armies for many of the "Arab" forces in the L'Art de la Guerre rulebook. 

That means that on eBay right now is an army made up of the following ADLG-based units;

• 3 Generals

• 1 Elephant 

• 2 "Dailami" Medium Foot

• 6 Ghilman Bow-armed Cavalry 

• 4 LH with bow

• 2 LH with javelin/Impact

• 1 LH Javelin

• 2 LF Bow

• 4 HI Spearmen

• 4 "DBx" bases of Bow + 2 "DBx" bases of Swordsmen, plus metal sabots to base them as bow-only or as mixed units

• 3 Knights

• 2 Spearmen

• 1 Crossbow unit

• 1 LF Bowman

• Army Baggage Train 80x40 base

Allied "Christian" contingent of

The figures are mostly Essex, but also include Outpost (most of the Arab cavalry) and a few others. They are all based and magnabased.

The auction ends around 8pm on Sunday 20th UK time. 

Dogs of War 2018 Game 4

The 4th Dogs of War video walkthrough has now been posted, in which the Nikephorians attempt to take on the Ghaznavid Empire in its most elephant-packed incarnation.

Rather than watch a tiny embedded version here, you are much better flipping over to fullscreen or viewing it in YouTube directly 

Saga - > ADLG, the Light Foot Sabot Basing Trick

With a mostly-plastic Gripping Beast 25mm Arab army in the planning phases, I've been toying with what to do with my 25mm Saga Arab army.

After dithering about rebasing them all into an ADLG force, the new edition of Saga persuaded me to keep them as a Saga army and duplicate quite a few of the figures for the new ADLG army - after all, plastic figures are pretty cheap and paint up easily too.

But, even so, having so many duplicates is still a little irritation, so I have been casting around for some 60x30mm sabot bases to at least get dual-use out of some of the "based on a new, magentizable 2p piece" Saga figures to use them as Light Foot in ADLG as well.

After emailing Warbases they pointed me to the ideal thing, a "2x1 Regiment Tray (2p)" which was hidden away on their site and listed without dimensions (erm...why do that for rectangular bases?)

And here they are, together with Rare Earth magnets (the bases come with pre-drilled holes for them) to hold the figures in place, and some sand/wood stain/drybrush & static grass to match the rest of my basing scheme.

These are the rather wonderful Perry Miniatures metal Naffatun figures (much nicer than the GB or Footsore ones I think, but they do come in a 6-pack which is quite a few more than you need..)

You can see just how strong the rare earth magnet is, as I'm able to hold them up by just one figure (but shaking them around is probably out...). For plastic figures like the GB bowmen and javelin-armed infantry I will use for other Arab Light Foot they will be even better.

Having ordered these I'm now considering whether a similar 60mm x 60mm base would work for holding 4 infantry as a "Javelinmen" unit in ADLG - perhaps I should have thought of that sooner and saved on postage!

Greece is the Word, and the Word is ADLG !

The recent international upsurge in the popularity of ADLG around the world has now lapped up against the sun-kissed shores of Greece, finding fertile soil in a local wargaming population who it turns out were both deeply steeped in the ancient DBx tradition, and also very happy about adopting an internationally-played ruleset that only requires you to paint and collect relatively small numbers of figures to put a new army on the table.

As soon as the first ever Greek ADLG competition was announced, attending therefore became something of a no-brainer and Greece was added to the list of ticked-off international competition venues that already included France, Belgium, England, Wales and Spain - especially after the epic time that was had by Team Central London at the last Patras event (in the days of DBM would you believe it?!) way back in 2003.

The following reports of the epic trek across Europe to get to the venue, and the even more epic competition itself contain dangerous amounts of pictures of food, some terrible Greek puns, amazing 15mm figure painting (mostly by my opponents) and a surprising number of positive results for a Ghaznavid army small enough to fit in the kind of biscuit tin you'd be somewhat disappointed to get as Christmas gift.

Hold the Halloumi, On With The Reports!!

Festive (ish) painting...

In the absence of any competitions to report on over the festive period, I've managed to fit in a little painting and photographing (is that a word?) time.

If you follow Madaxeman.com on Facebook you may well already have seen some of this rather unusual mix of stuff, but if not - here you go!

 Malifaux's Union Steamfitter - one of three in the pack, the other two of which I sold as I can't see myself using more than one in any single crew. J

She joins my MS&U-themed set of models, which is why I have used a WW2 Battlefront Russian tank star to symbolise her support for the international proletariat in their quest to avoid oppression at the hands of evil undead magic using fascists.  And painting a Billy Bragg T-shirt on a 32mm figure was beyond me.

 A Dawn Serpent - after all, who doesn't need a flying japanese-inspired dragon that is on fire and spreads poison in their lives?

This is a "wave 1" Malifaux model so has been out for several years. It's been on my "buy if it is cheap enough on eBay" list for the same length of time, and finally one came up at a sensible price.

The January 2018 errata has literally just yesterday reduced the in-game cost of the model, making it even better value on-table. Many of these you can see online have been "floated" by attaching the model to terrain on the base, but I wanted to try for a "it's just floating anyway" look, so I pinned it with a think black-painted piece of brass wire by the tail and half-hid it with grass tufts.

 Kandara - another must-have cool new henchperson for the already overpowered Sandeep.

Painting her was something of an exercise in doing single-model painting over a number of days, rather than my more usual "only seen in a unit at tabletop distances" style.

The on-fire hair seems to have been worth the effort though.

On the ancients front it's been more about refurbishing and rounding out some armies.

These are some genric Essex Miniatures arab foot who have been based and painted as Medium Swordsmen/Spearmen/Javelinmen for L'Art de le Guerre

This is my first use of the Armypainter acrylic washes in a squeezy bottle - previously I have always used the big tins of varnish-based tint, which do tend to dry up and so I'l always reluctant to use them for small batch work. The squeeze paint bottle sized washes can also be easily diluted - these are a done with a diluted version of the soft tone.

I also refurbished another old Essex Ghaznavid elephant

Not as bright as the first one, but I tried to use different colours.

And finally, a very lazy "rearrange the riders" bit of work on some Essex Byzantine cavalry to get a mix of Bow and Lance armed figures on the same base.

I'm planning on putting all of the ADLG Byzantine armies on table at some point this year, so you will see plenty of these guys online.

Two Armies, Two Podcasts...

With two L'Art de la Guerre podcasts now firmly under my belt it feels like an opportune moment to release them fully into the interweb by actually telling people that they exist.

Ideal to listen to whilst painting your own figures, in these two Podcasts (also available on YouTube, with pictures) are where you can learn from people who are far better players than I am about how to design a Ghaznavid or a Sassanid army list for L'Art de la Guerre.

The Podcasts are available to listen to via Podbean, also iTunes (honestly!) and are linked to from my L'Art de la Guerre page.