Dipping into Early Medieval Cavalry

 Another tidy-up project to be completed recently has been to dip (using the fantastic, non-smelly Biostrip 2.0 - which you can buy on Amazon UK using that affiliate link) and repaint some rather tatty Mirliton  (mostly) medieval lancers which I've had since winning them at a competition in Rome and then taking them to a competition Greece some 300 years ago. 

With the ability to print off waterslide transfers to supplement my rather basic shield design painting skills now a firm part of my repertoire, re-doing these cavalry will hopefully allow me to think about retiring some rather chunky 3D printed Early Medieval lancers that were one of my earliest 3D print purchasing experiments as well.

Add in some self-printed flags (with the edges all painted of course!) and I am now the owner of some rather bolt and positive-looking, Spanish/Italian-esque Medium Knights, all with admittedly rather eclectic and random heraldry (but who's counting eh?)

 

More refurbished Medievals

 Finally... the end of my refurb project for Medieval infantry! 

These are a mix of mostly Mirliton figures, with some Essex added in. All of the shields are pinted designs glued onto glued-together double-thickness business card paper and then varnished to seal them. 

There are even some Two Dragons in here as well as a Museum dismounted knight - the eye however is drawn to the shields so the differences in style and bulk are barely noticable (i think)

I trimmed down the cast-on shields for some of the figures to glue on the card shields - looking at the backs of the shields they are less than perfect, but that isn't really visible at all when they are packed together like this.

These are downloaded designs printed onto paper, glued onto the Mirliton metal shields. I didn;t do these as well as some, as I cut the patterns a little too small but the designs are quite bold so it isn't too bad. 

And all of the three sets of designs for the mixed units.  This will mean I can field the rather underwhelming but pretty Medieval Scandinavian army, or a number of Italian medieval armies with all sorts of different (invented!) cities heraldry.

Refurbished Medievals in 15mm

 Another project to suddenly stagger to fruition in the last week has been a load of stripped and repainted Mirliton 15mm Medievals - lovely figures that my previous paint job really didn't do justsice to.

This time around they have all been done with white undercoat (Halfords matt white car undercoat) and the main colours have been added with GW Contrast paints for a bit more "ping".

I've also done printed shields - some stuck onto the Mirliton shields, and some just made out of cardboard and cut to shape. These are the results:

All of these designs were found on Pinterest - the "fish" one on the right in particular is way too detailed for me (or I imagine anyone..) to paint in 15mm, however the other two also come out really strongly too. 

The ones on the left are Mirliton shields, with designs just printed on our home printer, glued on with PVA, trimmed with a very sharp scalpel (new blade time!) and then gloss varnished after painting in the edges.  The ones on the right are glued onto cardboard and cut to shape.

These are two bases of Polearm men - the printed out designs are probably a bit too large for the shields here I think in retrospect,.

The pavises on the left here are a mix of pictures of real pavises in museums, and re-enactors designs I found on Pinterest.

I still have a few more to do, but this is starting to creep towards enough mixed units to field a  Medieval Scandinavian army !