Madaxeman.com meets The God's Own Scale Podcast

This week I've made an appearance as a guest on the (increasingly scale-agnostic) Gods Own Scale Podcast, spending about an hour and a half chatting to Sean about all manner of things "madaxeman" and "ancients competition gaming"-related - and great fun it was too.

Sean is an exceedingly amiable host, and in the course of our chat we covered the dim and distant origins of Madaxeman.com (and how cobbled together it actually all is), the back story of how the Madaxeman Podcast came to be, some of my own personal wargaming history, and finally managed a bit of a shallow dive into the hoary old subject of "competition wargaming" - which, given both Sean and Ken "Yarkshire Gamer" Reilly had both put competition gaming into their own "Wargaming Room 101" on Kens last podcast, was kinda interesting to chew over to say the least.

Sean even managed to spring an "I'm Sorry I Think You're An Arse" topic on me at short notice, so that feature can now claim to have been syndicated to another podcast

You can listen to the episode on the Gods Own Scale Podcast on Podbean, or search for it through your regular podcast provider.

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.

Museum Z-range Camel Baggage Guards

As a mark of how much my pace of painting has slowed, here's a couple of bases (or packs) of Museum Z-range camel archers I must have bought in the Museum sale back in January! 

These guys are the type who appear as baggage guards for a number of Hellenistic and other Roman-era desert dwelling armies, which I picked up as the Essex camels I had are a little uninspiring (to say the least). 

These were undercoated in white and painted mostly in GW Contrast paints with some other colours added for the details.

This shot shows a Light Camel unit using Essex figures alongside the Museum camels. 

The Essex camels are a little smaller, but viewed from wargaming distances and angles the difference is barely noticable 

This shot shows the "old" Museum double-crewed Biblical Bedouin Giant Camel - still a monster casting, towering over the new Museum figures

 

And here are all three in a procession! 

This pair of Mediocre Medium and Light Camels will be guarding the baggage and frightening enemy Light Horse on a table near you in the near future !

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 !

15mm Corvus Belli (plus others..) Spanish infantry

 I've owned a DBA army pack sized force of Corvus Belli 15mm Ancient Spanish for many years, and they have from time to time served as an allied command to the Carthaginians - but I always harboured an ambition to extend it to a full army.

With the demise of Corvus Belli as a casting company for many years this was never really possible, but recently I managed to pick up a second DBA army box from a clubmate (thanks Mike!), add in a few more figures from the bits box and some odd figures from Clive's collection that didn't really fit into any other armies, and end up with what is hopefully going to be a viable Ancient Spanish army for ADLG.

These are the new guys:

6 bases of Impetuous Medium Swordsmen

The colour scheme is a bit random, but I've generally tried to get a lot of red, white and yellow as the dominant colours to make them look, well, "Spanish"-ish.

The central unit here is mostly Xyston figures, which look way bigger than the CB guys in the metal, but are not so bad when based up like this.

These guys have been based in 5's to represent Javelinmen and differentiate them from the Warband -types

These are the find from Clive's collection - they look like old Donnington figures, from both the Spanish and the (sort of) Etruscan type ranges.  

The shields are great - far better than I could manage these days - so much so that they distract from the rather old school statically posed figures. These will be the Celtiberian Internal Allied Tribe Heavy Infantry Swordsmen.