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?)

 

Forged in Battle Palmyrans - on printed horses!

 A trawl through the bits box recently unearthed a large number of riderless horses, and an almost-equal number of horseless riders... so what else to do other than cobble together some Frankenstein-like mixups of stuff I had clearly decided not to bother painting at some point in the past! 

Leading the way were these 6 FiB riders, which a bit of detective work revealed were from their Palmyran range. 

To be honest they are so generic that they went into my "Roman" drawer, and may appear as Romans, Palmyrans, Byzantines or anything else with a uniform look and a javelin in hand. 

In my current spirit of trying different painting techniques I've also done some very unsubtle "highlighting" on the blue cloaks to try and give them a "works at tabletop distances but looks weird close up" style...  and I think I've certainly nailed at least 50% of that target with these guys! 

The two horses nearest the camera in this shot are almost certainly Essex "generic" types, but the front 4 are all from the 3D Breed Numidians I painted up a while back, where my eBay purchase contained more horses than riders. 

These are some of the nicest horses I think I've seen in 15mm, but they are a tad brittle - so hopefully they can take the weight of the metal Forged in Battle riders!

Rear Supporting Romans

Even though I've been playing ADLG for ages now, I still have, well, "legions" of figures based up for earlier rulesets that are probably never going to see light of day under the ADLG army lists.

Some of my favourite "Roman" figures are the Late/Early Imperial Roman Archers from Donnington's originals ranges - their Imperial Roman archers paint up really nicely, and were much more prevalent in both DBM and FoG armies where units of 8-12 figures flitted across the tabletop, or indeed individual "psiloi" bases acted as rear support in integrated units with legionaries or auxilia. 

In ADLG the numbers of Roman skirmishers is much smaller (ish..) in that you get 0-4 units in most Imperial Roman armies, each of which is a single "psiloi" base of two figures... and so there ends up being are a lot of  'spare' ex-FoG and DBM light infantry archers kicking around the streets of Rome looking for gainful employment .. which brings us to Rear Support.

In ADLG the concept of Rear Support also exists, but is generally represented either by having different units of infantry with archers in their second rank (ie having a duplicate legion, some with integral archers on each base, some without... and I may be mad, but I'm not that mad..), or more often than not, by having some marker-bases to show which units have "Rear support" in any given list. 

So, after far too long I've finally bitten the bullet and rebased some of these archers to become Rear Support markers. 

They are based in pairs on 20x20 to give a decent enough sized marker to e noticable, but to also obviously not be a "base" of Light Infantry.

Some of them are also new figures that I bought recently - yes, despite having planty of spares I decided that I simply had to have some more of the "eastern" ones, seen here at the front. 

That's partly as they look really cool, and partly so they can be rear support for my Byzantines as well. 

And here they are in action, supporting some Donnington Auxilia and some Old Glory Legionaries 

You can find the archers in Donningtons catalogue here.

I Sea Peoples...

 Back in the mists of time a strange unknowable group landed on the shores of a far away land, ready and eager for war... 

..but enough of the players at the last edition of the Devonian Classic ADLG event in Brixham, Devon - instead it's now long overdue for me to share some photos and super-abridged battle reports of how my Sea Peoples army did in their 4 battles on the shores of Torbay back at the beginning of last December!  

The reports are pretty sketchy I'm afraid, partly as I didn't take many photos, but mainly as a load of real-world stuff happened right after the event finished which prevented me from cracking on with the reports whilst they were still reasonably fresh in my memory.

But anyways, there are some decent photos of Biblical-era troops in battle for you to have a gander at, as well as the army list for my partially-successful Sea Peoples Horde as well, so certainly worth sharing anyways in this post that appears on my website now. 

The Sea Peoples' Leader can Sea You Now ! 

 

 

Red Copper Camels Part 3 - How big are they again..?

 The Red Copper 3D printed camels were printed out for me by "In the Navy" Harry at "100%" in the "15mm" scale format they are supplied in - but they do look a tad on the large side, and he has also done some at 90% for me too which are still on the painting table. 

I've therefore taken a few shots of them stood next to other 15mm camels I own so you can see whether they look "too big" or not. 

In all of these shots there is a caveat that the Red Copper ones are based on MDF + magnabase + a steel  base, which I did to give them extra heft and weight. 

The other camels will be on either MDF + magnabase, or sometimes even cardboard + magnabase, so will be a smidge lower due to having thinner bases. 

Forged in Battle Camelphracts + Red Copper Camelry @ 100% of the 15mm print size

Red Copper and the (venerable) Essex Successor baggage guarding camelry.

This is quite a difference - in height, but also stylistically too.

Red Copper and the newish Museum Baggage Guard camels from their Z range. 

Height wise the difference is not too much, but the width and overall style of the figures is very different - but viewed from a tabletop commander's standpoint, perhaps not so obvious really.

 

Red Copper Camels Part 2

The main body of Red Copper camels are these chaps - 3 to a base, hard-charging Arab camelry

As you  will see I was even bold enough to try and do some chequered headdresses - although they are not actually "checks", they are just a cross pattern that looks checked at tabletop distances. 

As before, the main clothing of the riders is layered duns and creams - Burnt Turf/Barren Dune, Paratrooper Tan/Common Khaki, Urban Buff/Pale Sand, Ivory/White and my trusty Holy White Speedpaint topped off with standard white. 

These guys are also glued together into lumps of 3 on each base for extra resilience and integrity, to stop them breaking off at the ankles. It's more visible from the back here, but still hard to spot unless yo uknow you are looking for it 

With no obvious Commander in the range I opted for the "He's the one with the blue flowers on his base" approach if one is needed. 

The spears are very, very brittle, but fortunatelymost are cast (designed? printed?) very close to the bodies of the riders so its only the sticky-upppy bits that tend to break off (if you so much as look at them in the wrong way) 

I have an inkling that my almost-unavoidable desire to use blue as the dominant "non tan" colour comes from the cover of the 1970's edition of Frank Herbert's Dune.

Because of the complexity of the figures, and my ill-informed decision to adopt a multi-later layering paint style on these models they took absolutely ages to finish, and seemed to be a long way from being done for 99% of that time - but in the end, now the epic painting quest is behind me, I'm actually very pleased with the end result.