28mm Hellenistic Cavalry

My Successor/Hellenistic project moves on apace, with a recent spell of dry(ish) weather allowing me to do some outdoor spray undercoat, and then matt varnishing to make a dent in the cavalry contingent of this almost-all 28mm Victrix army.

An ever-increasing proportion of my painting is drifting towards Contrast (and Speed..) Paints, and the horses in this army I think will all end up being completed in this "so good it feels cheaty and a bit dirty" medium. 

 

Agaros Dunes is the leopard pelt colour here, with the firm favourite of Warlord Holy White for the grey horse. 

These are Heavy Cavalry lancers - I replaced the Vixtrix-supplied lances immediately, as they are very obviously not going to stand up to any sort of wargame handling at all, and drilled out the hands (manually) to accommodate home-made spears from 1.1mm (0.45") styrofoam round rods from Plastruc. 

These are really flexible, so will bend but not snap while also being really lightweight - a great combination where metal spears of this length would no doubt end up getting caught while being handled and then would break off the guys hands at the wrist. 

The Plastruct material is also really soft, so I was easily able to squash the ends of each spear flat, and then cut it into a V shape to form spear points which are also wider than the spear shafts.

If you want to pick some up for yourself, here's an affiliate link to eBay UK https://ebay.us/QLbKOr (and if you end up buying anything from it I'll geta teeny tiny commission from eBay too!) 

These are javelin-armed regular cavalry - I think the spears are a mix of the Victrix originals and also some slightly more robust Gripping Beast ones from their Roman and Arab boxes. 

If you keeping all of the spare arms you can then cut some spear-holding hands off at the wrist, do the same with the Victrix guys wrists and then glue the GB hands and spears to the Victrix guys arms to give your troops more robust spears, straight out of the bits box  

The white clothing on these cavalry is normal white paint layered over a base of Holy White - shield patterns from some spare Hoplite waterlide transfers, on a shield painted with a Contrast Orange which I think gives a really good "it could be burnished bronze" effect.

More pics to come over the next few days. 

Anglo-Irish Sardine Fiesta!

Once again the team based highlight of the global ADLG year comes around, with yet another trip to the tile-clad temperate oasis of sardines and port, Lisbon ! 

After a stunning bout of mid table mediocrity last year, the same 4-person Anglo-Irish team had been reassembled for another go at joining in the 100-strong contingent of ADLG players from around the world all congregating in Lisbon's Military Museum on the banks of the Mighty Tagus for the second September in a row - although this time we had shuffled the pack a little and all 4 of us had swapped themes around.

This saw me occupy the Dark Ages & Early Feudal slot, allowing me to use Feudal Anglo-Irish, featuring a load of figures that had't really been put on table before, but most importantly was the only Anglo-Irish list available! 

Read on to find out how this eclectic collection of Norman feudal knights, javelin-throwing Irish Kerns, English colonist yeomen with spears and longbows, Ostmen descended from Viking stock, and an allied contingent of axe-weilding Irish warriers fared in all 5 games from Lisbon 2023

You will find all the usual nonsense, as well as unique post-match commentary from Hannibal and the Anglo Irish Commander, who turns out to have been a rather strange hybrid of the very Irish Father Jack (from Father Ted) and the very English Jeeves (of PG Wodehouse fame). 

Roman Army Museum & the Vindolanda Fort

 The final tranche of photos from the epic trip to (and from) the Sighian Dubh competition in Irvine are now up and posted on this website, and feature a run-through of some of the key Hadrians Wall-adjacent history sites in the north of England

In plain english that means the Roman Army History Museum, and the nearby Vindolanda archeological site and museum on the northern border of the Roman Empire.

All of the photos we took are online on my website here , but hhere is a small smattering of them as well to give you a taster of the site.

You've already seen the "How big is that ballista" photos, so now is a chance to immerse yourself in the rest of Rome's northern border's history !

Painting 28mm Successors from Victrix: The Light Troops

I've finally managed to get some of the 28mm Victrix Successors I previewed in a half-painted state a few weeks ago finished, and into the light box for some professional-grade (ahem) photos. 

The context to this is that I'm building my first ever Successor/Alexandrian 28mm army, and so with a huge range of troops to choose from in Successor armies I didn't want to do my usual "try and make and spray the whole army in one go" thing, but instead break the task down into manageable chunks that I could stay motivated to complete - hence deciding to start with the "light" troops

That ended up meaning that my first (OK second - I have completed and taken photos of some test bases before now) batch of figures for this army ended up being Light Infantry, Javelinmen, Peltasts and a couple of bases of Galatian crazy heavy infantry (because, well, they are really cool figures.)

And, the results are now in, with this smattering of photos plus a whole lot more on the website :

The Successor painting page on the website has all of these and more, as well as some commentary on how I approached painting them in a "Contrast-plus" style.

RAF Cosford Museum: The Photos

The drive from London up to Irvine for the recent ADLG event was way too long to attempt in a singel day, so Dave from the Podcast and I headed out on Thursday evening after work, stopping just north of Birmingham (in Ironbridge) overnight to break up the journey.

Ironbridge is also - rather conveniently - very close indeed to RAF Cosford, the Midlands branch of the RAF Museum, and a place I'd long had on my to-visit military museums list.

So, after a hearty breakfast it was time to hit the halls for some aircraft (and Cold War AFV) action, the full results of which are now all online in the RAF Cosford section of my Museums Gallery pages. 

Here's a brief taster of some of the highlights:

The near legendary TSR-2, the great "what if" of British post war military aviation 

This Ju88 "defected" to England during WW2

The museum is the only one in the world with all 3 V-bombers on display

Yes, there are some tanks too...

Best way to display a Lightning - going straight up!

If you thought your wargames cupboard was disorganised....

This is actually an Airfix plastic kit in 1:1 scale from the BBC Richard May series!

 The museum website can be found here

Smoke me a Sporran, the Ottomans are heading North to Scotland !

 Finally, after many years of dithering, I at last was now about to add yet another country to the roster of places where I've played ADLG (a list including England, Ireland, Wales, France, Greece, USA, Portugal, Italy, Germany and Spain..) - in the shape of Scotland!

Yes, an epic drive to the West Coast border town of Irvine, famous for being the site of Scotland's 12th century military capital and, at the time of David I, Robert II and Robert III, being one of the earliest capitals of Scotland.

But all of that military history was about to be wiped from the slate by the advent of the first edition of the long-running Sighian Dubh event to take place outside of the suburban combat zones of Glasgow, and also the on-table debut of a long since painted Ottoman Turkish army as well!

The event was themed for Late armies - post 1066, which inevitably would mean a lot of heavy metal. I disregarded this entirely and picked an Ottoman force on the basis that I had painted the core of them a while ago and then added some of the scraps of Clive's collection of many Ottoman armies to round my handful of Legio Heroica purchases and Old Glory hand-me-downs up to a complete force, and because they also looked really pretty.

Read on for the usual heady mix of garbled nonsense, inappropriate Scottish-themed GIFs and videos, vaguely witty captions attached to pictures of little soldiers in action, and yet more cutting post battle analysis from Medieval Hannibal ! 

28mm Successors

 Last year at Warfare I turbocharged a rather slow-motion project to collect and paint a Successor army in 28mm by picking up a load of mostly-Victrix plastis figures to give me more than enough to cook up most Successor armies.

I'd already done a couple of test bases (elephants, some Thracians and a slinger unit) but with real life getting in the way for much of this year I'd really struggled to make time and desk space for painting and assembling the rest of the army... until quite recently when I made a stab at getting most of the lighter units ready to put on table. 

This meant some kitbashing with the plastic spares box, mostly working with one of the original Victrix boxes of Hellenistic Skirmishers - a 50+ body box with plenty of javelin and other light troops in it - together with having a bash at the couple of units of Galatians that every self-respecting Seleucid army needs to have in the middle of their line.

I decided to go for a "Contrast First" painting style for the army, starting with a matt white undercoat and then doing all of the flesh on these skirmishers and Thracians in Darkoath Flesh. 

This was almost good enough just for me to go with it for the army, but with the Galatians in particulat warranting a little more effort I then decided to add some rather rough and ready "impressionistic" musculature to the figures in an effort to see if I could do this to a decent enough standard that it wouldn't look totally rubbish!

This was the first real pass at it, using Vallejo Dark Flesh to pick out muscles on the figures. If you zoom in you can see its fairly basic stuff, but I did find these Victrix figures were ideally sculpted to help you identify which bits to pick out and highlight.

I then added a mix of mostly subdued colours to the skirmishers - the white is actually a Warlord Games paint called Holy White that seems to give a good effect without going "too" grey.

The Galatians got a bit more demarcation of their musculature as well at this stage, with some Sunny Skin Tone from Vallejo for additional highlights

After the usual rigmarole of white / gloss varnish / waterslide transfer / gloss varnish with a bit of Microsol and Microset thrown in for good measure the Galatian then had Battle Flag shield patterns too. 

These are the "Thracians" - they are Victrix Hellenistic Skirmisher bodies with added cloaks left over from various figures, some Gothic and Davian heads, and 2-part "falx's" made from the (over-) long curved sword blades from the Fireforge Arab Cavalry box glued onto one side of a figures fist, and a cut-off bit of spear (I think from the Gripping Beast Romans, as it looks pretty thick) glued to the other side. 

There are also plenty of javelinmen and archers - the guys with extra spears behind their shields are soaking up some of the excess javelins in the Victrix pack which have been snipped in half and glued either side of the fist holding the shield. 

The Galatians look particularly jolly with their shields all finished (with painted edges to match the transfer in most cases).  I just about managed to fit 7 on a standard 60x40 base, which gives a very dense formation feel IMO.

And here are the rest of the guys, with sand + woodstain basing, just now waiting for some touchups in bronze (post-matt varnishing) and for me to find and apply some static grass and grass tufts - which are somewhere in the house but are yet to be found! 

Once they are done I'll put some lightbox photos up of the finished articles