The start

More than 30 years ago when I started painting this army my plan was to have an army that could be used as either Italian Wars French or as French Wars of Religion Catholic - never mind the changes in appearance over that time. By the time I abandoned the project, I had only painted 32 landsknecht pikemen and 9 arquebusiers, 10 stradiots, some gendarmes, a couple of artillery bases and 12 reiter.

At the time I had been pretty pleased with my painting but when I picked them up again to start this project, most fell a long way short of the standard I aspired to. With so many great painting blogs showing fantastic painting, especially on 28 mm figures, my old school-boy efforts looked very poor. I was tempted to start again but I am a slow painter with limited time for painting so I settled on tidying up what I had so far, only repainting the very worst, re-basing for modern rules and trying to build on that.

The stradiots, reiter and artillery were easy enough - just a matter of rebasing though I also re-painted the stradiots' shields to add a bit more colour. 

Stradiots - Minifigs and Asgard / TTG

French Artillery - again a mix of Minifigs and Asgard / TTG

The previous project I had been working on was 15 mm World War 2. I had wanted the bases to be as unobtrusive as possible so based direct on 0.8 mm magnetic sheet. That worked well for WW2 - not so good for periods when one needs to move formations of multiple bases, not to mention the sheer labour and frustration of trying to cut the bases accurately so I soon swapped over to laser cut 2 mm MDF like everybody else.

Reiter - Minifigs.
Most of my Minifigs figures are from the first generation of individually cast 15 mm figures that they made, following on from the earlier generation cast in strips. I think it is a shame that these are no longer available as many were better figures than those which replaced them and are available today.