Nikephorian 15mm Cavalry Conversion

Inspired by the rather lovely Nikephorian armies which were on display in Patras, and realising that I have far too many early-ish Byzantine cavalry to ever use in one army I was recently inspired to convert some of them to later Nikephorian Byzantines.

Or, to be more accurate, I;

• sliced off the Essex Thematic (?) Byzantine Cavalrymen's small round shields with a scalpel, 
• replaced the too-thin, too-bendy Essex lancers with cheap sewing pins bought from eBay while I was at it
• cadged some kite and heater shields from a clubmate and glued them onto the now-sliced-off bits on the figures bodies.

After a bit of a go at painting overly-complicated shield patterns copied badly from other websites later, here you go - 6 units of Nikephorian Byzantine Lance & Bow armed Heavy Cavalry ready for the table!

The unit with the General in the centre has brass rod for its spears - I then realised that they are clearly just too thick for these chaps though, so I did the rest with cut-off sewing pins .

They won't win any awards, but not too shabby for a bit of recycling methinks.

On a similar basis, I also re-painted the shields on some almost-never-used Skoutatoi and glued the bases together to make ADLG units. Here's the slightly less impressive result.

The Icon standard is just downloaded off a Google search for Byzantine Icons, printed out and stuck on.

Maybe an army to use at Cry Havoc later this summer? 

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!!

The rest of the Chinese Crossbowmen

With 48 figures to play with, the Chinese Crossbow Painting Marathon has created lots of opportunities to pad out a number of armies (of course that does mean working on the old "WRG 6th" principle that there is kinda only one Chinese army, and that clothing styles changes little in over a thousand years, but hey...) and here are the full results to follow up on the previous blog post:

Two ADLG units with Pavise on the left, and then a handful of single-based crossbows painted up to match the uniforms of existing single-based halberd and spear armed infantry I already had, allowing them to be deployed together as mixed units, or for these chaps to be used in pairs as crossbow-only units that are colour coded to match the swordsmen-only units in the same army.

Yes, that  lurid dayglow green is a colour scheme on some of my troops - it's donkey's years old, and has even been on table before in some match reports. If I were painting the halberdiers these chaps go with now I probably wouldn't go with it again though...

I've had a load of these pavises lying around in the bits box for years, so finally they get some use. The designs are not wildly inspiring, but after toying with the idea of trying to go for a dragons face for all of, oh, half a second I opted for something easy.

With 48 men to paint, there were spares for a couple of Light Infantry units

Here's the full lineup of double-based Warring States and Han infantry, with Essex in front and Museum behind.

And, finally, from the rear... 

All of these pictures and more are to be found amongst the 3,273 photos of 15mm troops which are currently to be found in the fully-searchable 15mm Figure gallery on my website

15mm Samurai - and Samurai Terrain as well

A near-unique event today, as I post pictures of an army that I haven't painted myself... but don't worry, the usual bog-standard finishing is then in evidence with some bodged-together and over ambitious terrain !

The army is a 15mm Samurai force for L'Art de la Guerre. Mostly composed of Old Glory figures from Timecast, they are supplemented with a handful of Baueda Emeshi cavalry and a Dixon 28mm Great Commander.

All of them have been painted by Lurkio

The Samurai Village has already been posted online but this time there is also a self-made "ADLG Waterway" Samurai Castle wall to marvel at the amount of spare time I have to do stuff other than paint figures !

 The Walls come with a walk-through construction guide as well.

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.

The Chimu - 15mm Lurkio figures

You know how it goes, you have lots of stuff on the painting table, some of which you might need fairly soon... but that long-neglected project somehow insinuates itself into your mind and forces it's way to the front even thought it's of no use whatsoever?

Well, in the last week or so, that project for me has been painting a DBA v3 Chimu Imperial Army 1350-1480AD from Lurkio, that I won in a competition more than a year ago.

I don't really play DBA all that often, I have no intention of expanding the army to a full ADLG one, but these guys had been waiting to be painted and, well, one day I just got the bug...

See the full army here.

Carlos Vasquez and the Oiran

Carlos Vasquez is literally the new Hotness in Malifaux, a tanky Henchman with some exuberant flaming attacks.

I picked up the model, together with a box of Oiran on a recent trip to play at the English GT at Wayland Games, looking to expand my Showgirl crew.

Carlos is a slightly tricky but rewarding model to assemble and paint - the trickiness comes in whether or not to pin him. I did... find out why on this gallery

The Oiran are more straightforward, with some fiddly small pieces. Learn about my choice of colour scheme here.