Rebooted Vikings & Rus

With plenty of time on my hands I've been systematically rebasing some of my older armies, shifting them from DBM-era basing to ADLG double-basing, and in the process reorganising the figures as well to make more coherent ADLG armies and troop types. 

One of my largest DBM armies was a huge almost-all Two Dragons Viking/Rus force, with 80+ DBx HI bases, loads of medium foot and a ridiculous 44 LI with bow, allowing me to field full rear support for all 80-odd double ranked infantry when the army took to the field as Rus.

ADLG armies being considerably smaller than this has allowed me to not only update the basing, but to reshuffle the figures so I now have separate Rus and Viking warriors, and also separate bases of Vikings to appear as Spearmen, Swordsmen and axe-wielding Huscarls instead of the previous "Tonight Matthew, these figures will be appearing as..." hodge-podge of mixed bases I had before. 

I have also tarted up all of the spears - repainting them all in a lighter colour in line with my latest style, and added some basic blacklining on the spear tips and hands to give them a bit more "ping", and added some new banners using glued-together brush bristles to create "crosses", and then hanging (aka gluing) small vertical banners to the crossbars using graphics from a computer game which I found on Pinterest.

Now this project is complete I've taken a load of photos of the refurbished collection using my cheapo China-bought lightbox and my cheapo camera with a 400 ISO setting, and uploaded the full set of photos into the 15mm Gallery on Madaxeman.com where you can find them all in the Viking and Rus galleries

I've also posted some here too;

Generals & Valkyrie

Medium Axemen

Medium Warriors

Beserkers 

Huscarls

Spearmen

Huscarls again

And again...

Rus

Rus

Rus, featuring The (legendary) Rus Abbot in the centre of the line

Medieval Hungarians - an army from Essex !

After finishing the 10mm French and the 28mm Assyrians, the next Lockdown project has been a 15mm Essex Ready Made Medieval Hungarian army. 

It was sold as a FoGAM army, but with a bit of a squint has more than enough troops to give me all the options and more for both a Feudal and Medieval Hungarian ADLG list. 

With extra time in Lockdown I also took this as an opportunity to take more time than I usually do in painting the army, and especially to try and do the horses properly, in a process which is fully explained on the website (and is very simple). 

I also experimented with a new, higher resolution printer we now have at home, and found a load of images for shields on the web, printed them out onto normal paper and glued them onto the shields of the figures to make them a lot better than I could ever hope to paint.

I also upcycled some old figures and added new shield graphics to them as well. In the absence of LBMS transfers for this army it seemed to go OK. I've posted the WiP and lots of photos of the finished figures on a couple of pages on Madaxeman.com, including a link to download a PDF of some of the shield graphics I used

There's still a few more spearmen to come, but the bulk of the army is now online.

It's A Lightbox!

Having take thousands of photos for this site over the years against various very basic backdrops, usually with an angle poise lamp for lighting I finally bit the bullet recently and bought a mini lightbox (affiliate link) on eBay for just over a fiver - and frankly I'm already wondering why on earth I didn't do so ages ago!

It is roughly a 10" cube with one open side, with the lighting powered by a usb cable from my PC (which drives a line of LED's at the top of the box facing back into it). The one I got comes with a couple of backdrops (white and black - but it will be easy to make more), and folds away quickly for flat-pack storage.

If you want to have a look on your local eBay, this affiliate link will take you straight there (I get a teeny kickback from eBay if you buy one as well using this link).

Here's a load of (un-retouched) photos taken with my usual cheap camera, firstly of some of the Khurasanians I'll be taking to The ADLG Worlds this coming weekend, and then some of the Samurai who were in action at the BHGS Challenge a week or so ago so you can see how the pictures pan out.

Rasputina and Kaeris

Two more sets of eBay purchases, one of which was (mostly) painted and the other of which I did myself.... see Kaeris and Raspy added to my 3 existing Arcanist Crews for Malifaux!

Lots of photos of the painted models, with details of how I painted them;

A new desk lamp!

My old trusty Ikea lamp finally gave up the ghost about a week ago, with the lampshade bit basically falling off the arm as the heat of the bulb over the best part of the last decade had caused the metal to crumble!

So, a search on Amazon drew me to a lamp with a proper bulb (rather than a tiny, hot halogen one) .. which in turn allowed me to go for a daylight bulb as well. And here is the result

This the the Lloytron L1120WH - Swing Arm Hobby/Desk Lamp in White, only £26 from a seller on Amazon and delivered in a couple of days. Unlike my old lamp it comes with both a big heavy base, and also a screw-on clip thingy which I've ended up using here to fasten it to the edge of my desk, making some extra desktop space in the process. 

I then also picked up a Ecozone Biobulb, Energy-Saving Daylight Bulb, Screw Cap E27, This is a very bright 25W modern eco bulb, which is equivalent to 100w but is not as hot ! The clever bit is that it is a full spectrum daylight white bulb, so gives a very good "daylight" effect for painting - the shot above was using the "daylight" setting on the white balance on my camera. So in future you may well be seeing more pictures with natural colours...

This is a Forged in Battle Tiger I  that has been waiting to be finished since the Newbury show last year..

One of a set of three - photographed in "daylight"

And these are 2 bases of rather exuberantly painted XVII Century carbine armed cavalry from Essex, probably destined to join the "I already have too many to ever field" roster of horse as the 2 Elite bases in my always not quite successful enough Louis XIV French army.

My Guide to taking pictures of your figures

I've compiled a step-by-step guide to photographing figures, which you can see by clicking the title link above. Its dead easy, and I bet you already have all the equipment already to set up a studio just like mine!