A few more bits and pieces

The lead pile clearing continues with the following, some of which have actually been done for a while but haven't been photographed before now.

These are Blemmye cavalry from 15mm.co.uk - possibly to feature as African Kingdoms or even top quality Numidians at some point in future. 

They are (typically for 15mm.co.uk) rather small as this comparison to some Old Glory/Exxex Numidians shows

An Essex scythed chariot, made bold (and done easily) with Contrast Paints

Forged in Battle Numidian foot, given slightly bolder shields than my first pass at this lot had ended up with

These are I think Donnington, and were some of the refugees from Clive's collection that didn't go into a complete army 

 

3D printed chubby Samnites, upscaled from 10mm 

 

Xyston Ancient Spanish - a spare few figures I didn't paint when I did my Spanish army some time ago 

More of the 3D chaps 

I also have repainted an old Mirliton Late Feudal army - these are now mixes crossbow/spear militia, with printed shields/pavises. The crossbowmen may have some Essex dudes in there too 

Another couple of units with printed shields. I mean, who could expect me to paint THAT ! 

Teutonic Brother Crossbowmen with printed pavises   - these are Gladiator Games figures. 

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!

Refurbished Hittites

The epic task of selling off our late clubmate Clive's collection (on behalf of his family) was not 100% succesful. A rather battered looking Hittite army, presumably bought for DBM or DBMM, resolutely refused to tempt any of the people I offered it to - presumably the near total lack of chariot wheels and crew, and the 50%+ lack of even chariot bodies to accompany the vast numbers of horses was somehow off-putting!

Rather than consign it to the recycling pile however, I decided to take it on as a project, and contacted the nice folks at Essex as I know they have sold separate components in the past. 

They were happy to supply me with horseless chariots and crew, so after a lot of soaking-off of the robust original bases, a full rebasing, and the addition of some new, fully wheeled-up chariots the army has now become a pretty decent ADLG Hittite/Ugaritic force  

This is a pure-play Essex chariot, mounted on a 40mm round base to act as a General 

Both of these are the original Lancashire Games chariot bodies, some with wheels scrounged from the bits box (possibly stolen from unused Napoleonic gun carriages...) and a mix of the Essex and original Lancashire crew

Essex chariot bodies, painted in a simple GW Contrast red with white trim, with Lancashire horses and Lancashire crew 

This may well have been the only "original" chariot from the Lancashire range to survive, with even their own wheels !

Lancashire crew, Essex chariot body, Lancashire horses 

There were hundreds of these slingers from the Lancashire Makedonian range, all based as LI, which makes me suspect it was a DBMM army. They unfortunately suffer from the occasional Lancashire Games issue of very weak ankles, so I'm not sure how long they will survive. ADLG doesn't use many slingers, so I used a load of the spare ones to base up in blocks of 7-8 to use as Levy

These bowmen are very nice figures, and have robust ankles too.  I can see them making appearances in other Biblical armies as well.

I suspect these may be Essex refugees who snuck into the army - based up as Javelinmen, with a lone slinger hidden in the middle of the pack to bulk out the 8 of these figures to two bases of ADLG-appropriate numbers

These are the main body of infantry - using some bowmen to again boost numbers. The simple paint job the original painter did looks very effective, but is really just some easy-to-do dots - very effective for the effort!

The army list has some Elite bow units with Pavise, so having also found these pavises hanging around it seemed an ideal opportunity to use them.

The figures are mostly from the Lancashire Games range, and you can see a load more pictures of this army online in my 15mm figure gallery 

A Viking Battle Shed

 With a podcast and a load of painting all at the "finishing touches" stage, I thought I'd sneak out a few photos of Forged in Battle's Viking War Shed, which I picked up as the prize at the WAR 1-dayer competition earlier in the year. 

OK, technically it's a WE-F55 Meade Hall but I'm sure they may have also kept the odd lawnmower and set of garden tools in there too.

The model is a 2-part resin structure, with the roof being separate to the base. There is no internal detail so the roof just gets glued on after placing the posts around the sides.

The pillars and gable ends are separate metal pieces which need to be glued into holes in the base - some of which I had to drill out to take the lug on the metal beam. This was very easy to do with a pin vise, as the resin drills out easily enough.  

Some of the beams then needed snipping down a bit at the top as well to fit under the roof, and a couple needed building up with filler to join up with the roof once it was glued in place too. 

I painted it in a black Gesso undercoat, with many layers of different drybrushed browns and (eventually) pale grey and bleached bone.

Here it is with some 15mm 2 Dragons figures for scale.

I think it has come out as a very nice little building - useful for that Village next to the Waterway that the Vikings, Rus and Saxon types all like to have to narrow the table down so their shieldwall can't get outflanked!

 

Persians at the Tagus : ADLG in Lisbon

 Lisbon, and the Lusitania Challenge - a 4 person team event held in the Military Museum in Portugal's capital on the banks of the Tagus which I'd last been to all the way back in 2012.

In recent years the Lusitania Challenge has been reinvented and reinvigorated by the adoption of L'Art de la Guerre as its Ancient ruleset of choice, putting the event firmly on the map of the pan-European ADLG event circuit. 

This time around a staggering 24 teams (96 players) had assembled in the gun-infested bowels of the Lisbon Military Museum to do tabletop ancients battle together (and, also, eat sardines from tins as often as possible).

In terms of the actual gaming this was a competition with 4 players in each team, each playing a themed period roughly analogous to the 4 classic DBM Army List Books - and I was in Period 2, Roman & Classical. having decided that this prestigious international event was the ideal opportunity to put on table the wheeled Persian Archery Towers for the first time in competitive action as part of an Achaemenid army.

The general theory of the army was to use a combination of infantry archers (Sparabara and Immortals) together with good quality Satrapal and Guard cavalry on each wing to overwhelm any opponents mounted troops, and use the Archery Towers, some low-grade mercenary spearmen and a small force of mostly light horse in the centre to block and distract the enemy's capital troops and keep them from reinforcing what I hoped would be their by-then heavily embattled wings.

Over the course of 5 games and 2 days the Persians took on the Sassanid Empire, two lots of Early Imperial Romans, an Alexandrian Macedonian army and then ventured Eastwards to fight the Classical Indians, giving a wide range of opposing armies and troop types for the Achaemenid plan to be tested against. 

All 5 battle reports are now available on the Madaxeman website, complete with the usual mix of irrelevant captions, post-game analysis and insults from Hannibal, in-detail reporting of our culinary  and beverage related exploits in and around Lisbon, and links to how I cooked up the wallpaper for the towers and the pavises of the Persian army.

Read the 5 reports and the culinary analysis here 

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