Scenery - Vineyards

Among the scenery types available to the Italian Wars French in FoG-R are vineyards.  I have seen a lot of good commercial and home-made vineyard strips but they all seem to depict modern-style vines, grown in perfect straight lines on wires strung between posts. I’m no expert but it seems unlikely to me that 100m rolls of galvanised wire would have been available in the 16th century so this approach doesn’t seem quite right.

I made some online searches to try to find illustrations or descriptions of pre-industrial age vineyards without success, although I’m sure somebody has studied this area and published their findings. Whilst on holiday this summer, I saw a number of small vineyards near Minerve in the South of France with individual vines grown as bushes, pruned to slightly elongated shapes and in rough rows but with no wires or stakes. That seemed a more likely model to me for how most vineyards would have looked during the Italian Wars, so I based my pieces on that.

The armatures for the bushes were made from some fairly thin (about 0.5mm) steel wire which I had lying around. I cut this to approximately 40 mm lengths and twisted them together in threes using a pair of pliers. For the first few, I just twisted the three together but these tended to fall apart so I started giving an extra couple of twists to two of the wires and this made them more secure and also, I think, gave a more realistic and interesting shape. I cut the ends to length so the short, equal ends provided the ‘roots’ and bent the ‘branches’ to a suitably convoluted shape. I then covered the twists of the trunk with Araldite.  

Most vineyard bases seems to be made on lolly / painting sticks but I wanted something a bit heavier and more stable so I cut strips from the same offcuts of Amtico which I used for the broken ground markers. This time I chamfered the edges so they would blend in with the bases a bit better. I glued the armatures on with hot glue - I’m not very used to using this and didn’t make a very neat job of it as can be seen in the photo.

I built the base up using flexible decorator’s caulk, the same as for my fields, with grit and sand stuck to this with PVA and painted in my usual way. The armatures were then painted with Vallejo German Cam Brown and dry-bushed with the same colour mixed with white. 

The foliage was made from woodland scenics clumping foliage. The basic clumps were far too big for these little bushes so I cut some of them down with a kitchen blender. I glued them on with hot glue - this was suitably tacky and built up well over the armature but it was very stringy and showed through the clumps in a few places as noticeably high-gloss areas. Maybe somebody can suggest a better choice in future? After the glue was set, I used tweezers to remove excess clumps and the strings of glue - looking at the photos, I missed a few strings.

To hold the clumps together and make it all more robust, I soaked the clumps with dilute PVA and tried to shape them to cover the bare patches of glossy hot glue. When that was all dry, I painted the remaining visibly gloss bits of hot glue with dark green paint, creating the problem of different greens so I dry brushed with progressively lighter greens to get a uniform effect.

French Crossbowmen - Aventuriers (1)

I always intended to have some light infantry crossbowmen for my French Army so I could use it for the earlier Italian Wars. I got as far as buying some Table Top Games figures many years ago and, a bit later, some from Gladiator (now Black Hat Miniatures) but never actually painted them. Partly I stopped because I wanted more variety of figures in the unit but then I dropped out of wargaming and they sat in a cupboard for a long time. When I re-started and decided to complete my small 16th C collection as an Italian Wars, French army for FOG-R, the problem of getting enough variety in the unit, whilst maintaining a reasonably homogenous look, remained. I bought various other crossbow-armed figures so I had the variety but several looked too early and every crossbow was different and incompatible and so they remained in the cupboard while I painted other units.

From left to right: TTG, Gladiator, Naismith, Naismith, Essex, 4 from Old Glory, 2 from Venexia

Now I have almost got a 900 point army finished, I just need 8-12 bases of Adventurier crossbowmen for my early army and 4 bases of mounted arquebus for my late option. Either will involve some substantial modification work so I have finally made a serious start.

From experience with my Swiss, Landsknechts and Gendarmes, I think quite large differences in figure size and style look OK as long as the weapons are fairly uniform. Achieving that was easy with pikes, quite easy with heavy lances but a bit more of a challenge with crossbows.

The cast crossbows vary in length from 9mm (Venexia) to 14 mm (TTG / Altuos) and in span from 8 mm (Venexia and Old Glory) to 11.5 mm (Essex). There is also a lot of variation in shape of the bow - whilst contemporary crossbows seem to be mostly thin steel, these were all quite think with the TTG bow apparently 1.2 mm in diameter - like a scaled down 5" fence post. Even worse, the Old Glory figures come with a solid mass of metal filling in between the bow and the string.

I decided to cut the longest bows down in length and replace all the actual bows with flattened, shaped (with a needle file) and bent pieces of 0.7 mm brass rod to give a pre-bend span of 8-9 mm. This isn't quite as fiddly as it sounds but it is much more of a faff than just replacing cast pikes.

After cutting the bows (and string and fill-in metal) of the first couple of Old Glory figures, I found I could get quite a reasonable effect by drilling out the filled-in area then cutting and filing away to just leave the thinned bow and the string. It isn't quite the same as the brass bows but I think it looks OK and matches in reasonably. It does raise the question though of whether I should string all the others.

The second issue is that some of the figures are very medieval looking. Also the hats on the Old Glory figures don't look very French to me.

I have been following Stuart's blog about converting 28mm 15th Century figures to represent early 16th C French. Fantastic work with a lot of original research and far beyond my abilities but he shows how to put together some great French skirmishers with crossbows and arquebus and I decided to try something similar with these smaller scale figures. I have chosen what I think are the most suitable figures - 4 each of 6 different ones for my 12 bases - and started modifying them by filing and adding Milliput. There's a long way to go with this but I am quite encouraged so far.

This shows the brass replacement bow v cutting away on the Old Glory figures. The three OG  figures will get new hats made from Milliput, as I did with my French arquebusiers. The other three figure types I chose are the Venexia figure with a helmet, the Naismith figure winching and either one of the OG firing figures or the other Naismith figure or maybe two of each.

Good news for Venexia fans!

In the gap between me stopping collecting and painting 16th C war-games figures, Venexia came onto the market and disappeared from it. Whilst I have managed to buy a few of these fantastically detailed figures second hand, it has been very frustrating to think of what might have been.

The master figures were bought by Sgt Major Miniatures in the USA and there has been a lot of speculation and anticipation about when and whether they would be brought back into production.

A few weeks ago I wrote to them asking and have just had a very welcome and encouraging reply:

Subject: Venezia Italian Wars range 

Sorry for the delay, I have been having some issues with the web site eating messages, and failing to alert me as they come in, cleaning up many old messages this morning... 

I am slowly working on getting the line back into production.  I have issues with the master figures they supplied when I bought the company, they melt in the mold maker, I think they must have some solder or something in the metal, its completely ridiculous! Anyway, the process to fix this is incredibly slow unfortunately.  I have gotten the Ottomans back into production, and the Italian Wars should be back in the next couple of months.  The Louis line is currently being re-done, and the rest of the lines will follow that.  Its been 4 years since I bought this line, and I want it back in production as much as everyone else, probably more, I haven't been able to make any sort of return on my investment thus far...  

ThanksAndy

Sincerely,Sgt Major Miniatures

Good news - the wait should soon be over and I'll be at the front of the queue for some gendarmes!

Expanding horizons

I started this blog to record my progress in building a 15mm French army for the 16th C. Great Italian Wars for FoG-R - hence the name. I completed enough units for that (plus some options) in the summer of 2016 then called a halt because it looked like the excellent Venexia 15mm range would be coming back into production with Sgt. Major Miniatures and I wanted to use those for the remaining units - mounted arequebusiers, archers, better gendarmes, for example.

Time passed,  Sgt. Major Miniatures closed up shop and my blog sat in suspended animation. I have been doing other wargaming things, as I mentioned in a post in October 2017, I have been doing other wargames and modelling things but the narrow blog title and scope I had chosen put these beyond what I thought I should include here. I started another blog 'Midland Shipyard' for my waterline ship models in 1:1200 and 1:1250 but I have a wide range of interests (some might say I'm just easily distracted) and I don't want to end up with a dozen different blogs.

Whilst I'm not going to change this blog's name, I've decided to make it a general one for all my wargames and modelling activities apart from the waterline ships.

There's a lot of catching up to do and exciting possibilities for the future.

I've been making a lot of scenery, prompted especially by some WW2 Normandy games and have just had my first game of Mortem et Gloriam so I am looking to re-base and complete my old Late Roman army for that.

Of course, Venexia 15mm Italian Wars is now back in production, thanks to Lancashire Games - I'm looking forward to getting some of those soon. Almost simultaneously, Blue Moon launched a very wide and high-quality range - none specifically French as yet but they were canvassing opinion on TMP a while ago so I'm hopeful. There are also rumours of new figures from Khurasan and their late 16th Century range looks really good too.

So many possibilities, so little time and focus!

Classical ruins

One of my biggest impressions from holidays in Italy is that physical reminders of the past, especially Ancient Rome, are everywhere so I thought my Italian Wars scenery should include some classical ruins. My idea was to do these, like most of my other scenery, as marker pieces to be placed on an area, in this case to be classed as broken ground.

I looked out for a suitable model - ideally not very big or expensive - for quite a while. There seemed to be a lot in 28mm, and some brilliant but large and expensive complete models but nothing small and cheap for 15mm. By chance, I then stumbled across some resin cast pillars at a Wargames show. I think they were on the Magnetic Displays stand, though I can't now find them on their website. With 2 x 55mm high fluted columns for a pound, they were perfect for my purposes and I bought a couple of packs. 

The pillars were sculpted as though made from three pieces and without plinths and capitals. To avoid having all four identical heights and appearances and make them go further, I cut up two of them - the top tier off one and the top and middle of the other then cut two of these pieces lengthways at an angle so I could place them to give the appearance of half-buried pieces. I made the plinths and capitals from card, foam-board and 2mm mdf. After sanding the sawn ends flat, I distressed them and the exposed mdf of the plinths and capitals to give a worn and weathered effect - probably more than is realistic but sometimes wrong looks right.

The foam-board for the plinths was a bad idea as it is a weak point that I can easily imagine breaking at the slightest rough handling. I'm not sure whether to reinforce them now with a screw from the base (and risk damaging them) or see if they do actually break.

The base boards are 2mm mdf and I marked it out in 10mm squares to get the thin card paving slabs (9.5mm squares) and column plinths spaced evenly.

The next step was to cover the bare mdf parts of the boards with filler to represent the build up of debris over and around the ruins in the thousand years or so between the end of the Roman Empire and the Italian Wars. At this stage, I also attached a few small rectangles of foam-board to represent fallen blocks of masonry.

I left a couple of areas of bare mdf on top of the high points to give a good surface to attach the cypress trees.

I then covered around the roots and textured the filler with sharp sand and small stones. The whole thing (apart from the trees!) was given a coat of brown emulsion, decanted from a big pot I bought as and end of line item some years ago.

For the temple stonework, I used a wash of Humbrol black enamel paint in white spirit. When that was completely dry, I gave it a heavy dry brush of Vallejo 987 Medium Stone. Dulux Bleached Lichen 1, which I have in my scenery paints box and use for roads,  looks virtually the same and would have been cheaper.

When that was fully dry - overnight - I applied a thin wash of a medium green in the cracks, recesses and around the base before dry brushing again with Dulux Bleached Lichen 2 and a final light dry brush of Dulux Bleached Lichen 2 mixed with about white. 

The 'earth' areas are my usual basing / scenery ground recipe: dry brush yellow ochre then yellow ochre + white with static grass and tufts applied with PVA. I also added some dark green clump foliage and a bit of foliage net to represent a climbing plant growing up one of the columns. 

More Italian Wars French Crossbowmen - Aventuriers

Although I started my French Crossbowmen / Aventuriers in early 2016 and finished the first group of 12 in June 2016, for some reason the second group of 12 stuck. I got distracted into other areas and every time I looked at them languishing in the incomplete painting tray of shame, there seemed to be something more urgent or at least more interesting to do.

With the extra leisure time at home enforced by the Covid-19 restrictions, after spending a lot of time on a 1/1250 model of HMS Queen Elizabeth, I finally got round to completing them. This gives me an early and late option of either 12 bases of crossbowmen in skirmish order or 12 bases of arquebus is loose order.

The new group is at the front. 

I still have plans for some more units for my French Italian Wars army: at least one unit of archers (the heavy cavalry type), a full 6 of Landsknetch skirmishing arquebus and some more clearly French artillery now the new range from Khurasan is available. 

I have the figures for two more pike keils - one Swiss, one Landsketch and more Gendarmes (with Venexia figures) but these will have to wait until I've completed my Romans and a load of WW2 figures. Even then, I'm not sure I can face another two 14 base pike keils!

Swiss Pike Keil

I have wanted a 16th Century Swiss Pike block for a long time and, having waited so long, I wanted to make as good a job of it as I could.

As with the rest of this army, I wanted to get as much variety of pose and dress as I could whilst maintaining a consistent size, build and style. The big problem in making a 16th Century Swiss pike block had always been that hardly anybody made 16th Swiss. Minifigs make an armoured and an unarmoured pikeman (I bought a pack of each), both wearing berets and the even older Asgard/Table Top Games/Altuos range has a few figures, some of them rather odd looking, but that was about it. The many other Swiss Renaissance ranges in 15mm were all from the late 15th Century Burgundian Wars. With nothing like enough different figures or good enough figures to achieve the variety I wanted, the Swiss never progressed beyond a wish.

Now Khurasan from the USA have come to the rescue with a range of Swiss for the later Italian Wars, Pavia and after. This includes a command pack, armoured and un-armoured infantry (the same figures with a  choice of halberds or cast pikes), arquebus, a light gun and a “renaissance death” figure. The pike/halberd infantry each come in 4 different poses and the arquebus in three.

In many ways these are excellent sculpts and almost my ideal figures: relatively realistic proportions (apart from a few huge hands), excellent detail and cleanly cast but… sadly there are a few buts that maybe don’t make these the ideal figures for everybody. First of all, they are only available direct from the USA, shipping charges are understandably high and the owner has a slightly idiosyncratic way of business - not a bad thing in some ways - the website isn’t taking orders right now so they can catch up on shipping those they have already, surely better than over-promising but under-delivering. However, you may need a bit of patience. Next, their realistic proportions make them quite fragile and some of the bases, ankles and necks are very thin and easily damaged. Also the poses aren’t quite as I would have wished - many hold their weapons heavily slanted off to the right and generally the heavily armoured figures have theirs vertical whilst the lightly armoured rear-rankers are angled forwards. I used a couple of those with the weapons angled at a low angle as extra standard bearers and others with halberds for the two elements with heavy weapons and two more mixed in among the pikes.

Khurasan 15mm Swiss

For all that, the Khurasan figures are the only game in town and very good overall. To get a bit of extra variation and expressing my inner Yorkshireman, I decided to mix in my Minifigs Swiss - the armoured pikeman matches very well but the un-armoured one is not so well proportioned and looks a bit too squat. In all cases, for strength, I glued the pikes so they touched the ground as an extra point of contact although most are clearly designed to be held well clear of the ground. I originally planned to include a pack of Minifigs French Pike but, after painting one of them, I decided they didn’t really match. I may need them for a block of French Legion at some point.

Left to right: Khurasan, Minifigs Unarmoured Swiss, Minifigs French, Minifigs Armoured Swiss, Khurasan

To differentiate the Swiss from my earlier Landsknecht (apart from the Swiss crosses and hand and half swords rather than katzbalgers) I decided to use a more restricted range of colours with the majority of figures having at least some red. I also went with only white feathers. As usual I used brass wire for the pikes so ordered all the packs with halberds - I have plans for some of them as discarded weapons for disorder markers.

The final point was to sort out some flags. I was very disappointed to find that the Swiss in mercenary service didn’t use their iconic cantonal banners but something relating to their paymasters. I took much of my information on flags from Massimo Predonzani’s book on the battle of Cérisoles. This excellent reference is only available in Italian or French but, even for somebody like me who can barely manage an Asterix book in French, is well worth getting. In summary he says that Swiss flags in French service always had the French white cross; with the arms reaching the edges of the flag, in contrast to the truncated Swiss white cross. They would have either quarters in different colours or with bands of different colours to differentiate between the various sub-units. The general trend was for the number of bands to increase with time. At the time of Pavia there were three bands: yellow with blue, white or red. I’m not 100% convinced by this. Although the Pavia tapestry clearly shows three unequal yellow bands on a white (maybe blue or grey - it is all a bit faded) background with a white cross (not a great combination if you want a strong colour contrast) this looks a bit awkward and later flags had equal numbers of bands in each quadrant. Typically flags were 2.8m high by 3.7 wide - I made mine at about 1:110 and they seem huge. I wish I had done the flags before basing so I could have taken care to make space for them in the next rank - I might even have used double-depth bases to combine the second and third ranks.

All my previous flags (apart from the St George and the dragon Gendarm flag) have been hand painted but I needed 4 flags for the keil, another for the arquebus screen and some more for the camp which I was finishing off at the same time so I decided life was too short. These (maybe temporary) flags were designed in MS Excel and printed off on an inkjet.

Scenery - woods, rough ground and fields

I have just made myself a new war-games board to fit over the dining table and bought one of the excellent Mat O’ War cloths from Antenocities Workshop http://www.antenocitisworkshop.com/mat-o-war-green-2m-x-1-25m.html and wanted to upgrade my scenery to match the mat, my basing colours and be compatible with the rather prescriptive rules of Field of Glory Renaissance.

I already had some hills that could be re-surfaced and plenty of hedges and trees so my main requirement was for the various types of flat area terrain: woods, broken ground, brush, fields, vineyards, plantations, etc. I looked at the ready made scenery from Miniature World Maker - I liked the way this lay flat on any surface and its durability but it seemed expensive and wasn’t a very good colour match for what I wanted so I decided on the home made approach. 

Antenocities recommended a particular static grass as a good match for their green Mat O’War so I  had ordered a couple of packs of that but when they arrived they seemed too bright. Luckily I already had a bag of darker and duller static grass which I had been using, dry-brushed with yellow ochre to lighten and high-light, for basing my Italian Wars army. This mixed in to give a much closer match and plenty for my needs. 

The first question was what to use as a base material. I wanted something flexible, tough, not too thick but heavy enough to lie flat and not move about. Many years ago I acquired some green and grown carpet tiles to use as a playing surface and give a patchwork field effect for 1/300 scale WW2 (you could get away with simpler scenery in the 80s!). After pulling the felt-like covering off and singing the last fibres off, wire brushing and sanding the surface of the rubber-base, I was left with just the type of base I wanted. These were only one foot square and It would be great to get some slightly bigger pieces but all the modern tiles I have seen so far have the carpet surface too deeply embedded in the rubber. 

I decided to just use the same basic technique and colour scheme that I use for figure bases. A base of sand, glued on with PVA. A base coat of dark earth then dry brushed first with yellow ochre then a couple of progressively lighter yellow ochre and white. The static grass is then glued on with more PVA, followed by any tufts. Instead of my usual Humbrol matt dark earth for the base colour, I bought a brown emulsion match pot and mixed in some other acrylics to get a fairly close colour match. I should have just got a litre of Dulux mixed to match a colour swatch - I’ll have to do that anyway as the first pot has almost run-out now.

The first thing was to make some general purpose irregular terrain areas that could serve as woods, broken ground or brush with different types of add-on features. The rubber cuts easily with a craft knife then it was just a matter of applying the fine sand, painting and glueing on the static grass.

This shows both trees and broken ground markers - in use it would be one or another. The broken ground markers are offcuts of Amtico flooring with caulk to add height, granite chips and sand. All painted and with static grass and tufts as usual and Woodland Scenics clumping foliage as bushes.

Next on this list was some straight-sided pieces as fields, plantations and vineyards. I wanted to put some more detail into these, sacrificing flexibility of use. One advantage of the fairly thick (about 3mm) base, is that features can be carved into the surface so I cut shallow trenches along some parts of the sides to indicate ditches. I left a wide enough space around the edges to take the hedges I already had so I could distinguish between open and closed fields. 

I wanted a ploughed effect on some field sections so spread decorator’s caulk over the surface and used a piece of card with a serrated profile cut in the edge to drag across creating the furrows. I also used a coarse brush to create tracks between field sections. For the fields, I added a few small rocks and grit around the edges to add interest. 

After the usual painting I used dark washes to deepen the ditches and added dark green 6 mm tufts to represent reeds and unusually lush grass in the arid Italian countryside. I considered using a proper water effect but was worried that might crack and settled on a couple of coats of gloss varnish - over such a small and thin area I think the effect is just about OK. I only applied static grass around the edges to blend in with the Mat O’War. 

I wanted part-grown crops along the tops of ploughed areas. I imagined this would be easy - brush across with PVA which would only catch on the high points then scatter on finely minced clumping foliage. That didn’t work at all. After some more trial and error, the best result was a couple of cycles of painting along the furrows with PVA and covering with a fairly fine turf mix.

Even with painting the tops with PVA, clumping foliage didn’t give very clear definition.

Foam particle turf mix worked better, I think.

This empty field shows how the hedges fit on to make it an enclosed field. My plan is that this could also be used as a plantation or vineyard (the vines are a story for another day).

It would be great to get some comments on these posts. So far, there have been a few hundred views but no comments but I'd really welcome some constructive feedback. 

Late Roman Army revived from the 1980s

Back in the early 1980s, I began to collect a 15mm Late Roman Army with figures from Minifigs and Asgard / Table Top Games. I painted up a few units and part units, based them for "Shock of Impact" but never completed the army before going to University and leaving them to languish in a box.

I must have had some renewed plan to complete it later because I bought some more Minifigs legionaries and a few Gladiator Miniatures (I previously mis-remembered these as Museum Miniatures) command figures but nothing came of this.

After returning to war gaming, my focus has been on the Italian Wars and WW2 Normandy so the Romans stayed in their box, in the loft.

Last Autumn I was introduced to Mortem et Gloriam with a game of Punic Wars Republican Romans v Macedonian Successors. I really liked the game and this set me to thinking about finishing off my Late Roman army for MeG. I'd only need a few extra figures and could just tidy up and re-base the already painted figures, do a quick paint job on the others and I'd soon have a usable army.

I regret I didn't take a real 'before' photo of the old painted figures and the Roman lead pile (Plumbi moles Romanae). This was taken after I had already started cutting figures off the old bases and, in a fit of enthusiasm, glued some figures onto a command base. 

In reality, I found that the level of "tidying up" needed to bring them anywhere near the standard I now aim for was almost as time consuming as starting from scratch and I can't really do "quick" when it comes to painting. Worse, several of the figures had contracted lead rot in their years in the loft - in some cases this was obvious and they went straight in the bin but others were salvageable. In a few cases, the deterioration only emerged when I had tidied them up and was basing them - one officer just snapped off at the ankles as the rot extended almost completely through.

Today there are fantastic Late Roman ranges available from Legio Heroica and Khurasan. By comparison, my old figures suffered from a lack of variety in the poses and extreme differences, for example: in the interpretation of what an infantry shield should look like. For some reason, Minifigs made their Legionary and Auxilia shields quite curved, Asgard flat but smaller and with rounded edges and Museum Miniatures flat with sharp edges but smaller still!

From L to R: Gladiator Miniatures, Minifigs Legionary, Minifigs Auxilia, Minifigs Legionary Lanciari.

As I researched the 4th and 5th Century Roman Army, a more fundamental problem emerged. The Minifigs and Asgard figures were based very closely on the WRG book, "Armies and Enemies of Imperial Rome" by Phil Barker, illustrated by Ian Heath, 1981. Whilst that is a fantastic resource and still useful today with, for example an extensive illustrated section on shield patterns from the Notitia Dignitatum, Phil Barker chose a couple of very different interpretations of the historic evidence from current thinking. In the WRG book, 4th and 5th Century Auxilia are un-armoured and Legionaries have sculpted rawhide armour whereas the current thinking is that mail armour was usual in battle. As I have more than a hundred of these, this gave me a bit of a dilemma.

Apart from the flash on the Legionary, another problem is that the Auxiliary's spears are prone to breaking off at the edge of the shield so I need to decide whether to replace only the broken ones or do them all - the blend of the spear into the body makes this more of a job than usual but it would give the me chance to vary the angle and pose a bit. 

In the end, I decided to work with what I had: make alterations to give uniformity in shields; mix and match to achieve some variety in pose but accept the un-armoured Auxillia and rawhide clad Legionaries as a little bit of 1980s nostalgia. That gives me enough figures for 3 x 6 base units of Legionaries and 1 x 6 base Auxilia. When those are painted, I'll decide about what to do for the 2 or 3 more infantry units that I'll need.

One last thing I should mention is a new accessory - an illuminated magnifier that I found on
Ebay (actually me wife bought it for me, for my birthday). A Kemot 5 diopter (2.25 x) magnifying lens surrounded by LED lights. The negative points are that flex is a bit short and comes with a continental plug (albeit with an adapter thrown in) but for a bit less than £35 it is brilliant - for me, the perfect balance of magnification and depth of field for figure painting. For some years I have used a small stand magnifier and an external lamp and this is a huge, step up and highly recommended.

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. 

Army box labels

With a growing number of Really Useful Boxes full of figures and vehicles, I thought some sort of labelling would be a good idea to avoid having to open each in turn to see what was inside.

Rather than just having text labels, I wanted some pictures. It was easy enough to find images on the web that would be suitable for the Romans, Italian Wars French and 11th Armoured Division but the WW2 Germans were a bit more difficult - I certainly didn't want boxes with Swastikas on the side but nothing else seemed to have sufficient immediate impact and recognisability. In the end, I went for a plain German cross against a 3 colour camouflage - as seen on the sides of vehicles. After a bit of searching, I found a suitable image which I cropped and edited to make sure the colours were bright and distinct then superimposed the cross.

First German Platoon

For this first platoon, I used all new figures and tried to follow the clean painting style and colour choices on the excellent Crac des Chevaliers blog.

I'm pleased with the result and it is certainly an improvement on my earlier WW2 Germans, painted with lots of dry brushing and with a far too blue field grey, but inevitably it falls a bit short of what I was aiming for. Not quite as clean as I wanted and the varnish has gone satin - not sufficiently mat varnish really is my Achilles heel! 

These took quite a long time. A combination of  trying to follow somebody else’s methods and a strictly defined colour scheme with much less space for making it up as you go compared with my Romans or Italian Wars collection. Ah well - practice makes perfect.

One issue from using a single base for a section, including the LMG team is that you can’t really use prone figures firing a bipod MG42 mixed with upright figures. It looks ok with advancing figures, as below, but I’m not 100% convinced by the standing firing figures. 

I especially pity the loader here, being used as a rest for the MG42. Really hope he has some good ear plugs!

Normandy Buildings.2.

I clearly needed more buildings for 1944 Normandy. Unlike for the Italian Wars, for this period the Wargamer is almost spoilt for choice with many manufacturers offering models in 15mm. However, many of these didn't really match what I was looking for. I'm not a fan generally of MDF buildings as they just look too sharp and unconvincing (without a lot of extra work) and many of the resin models seemed too small, badly moulded, lacking in detail or just too generic.

Online image searches led me to the excellent models from Tiger Terrain. I can't speak highly enough of these - they actually look Norman and the attention to detail, modelling and production quality are absolutely first class. The prices and service are good too and there is a wide range of models covering town and rural buildings.

The first ones I painted were these two bomb or shell damaged village houses. They came complete with a cratered garden to create a small diorama but I left them as three separate pieces to give extra flexibility in arranging the village layout for different games.

One thing I really need to do is find some suitable lettering for a name above the shop - every French village needs a boulangerie and a café!

Next came a farm. One of the good things about the Tiger Terrain website is a gallery of painted buildings, several set on scenic bases and this inspired me to do something similar. As well as the buildings, the walls are Tiger Terrain but the base is just a piece of MDF cut to size and textured with filler and sand, using the same methods, paints, static grass and clumps that I use for basing. The trough and pump were scratch built from card, plastic rod and wire with the water in the trough represented with epoxy glue.

One thing I really struggled with was getting the stone colours right. I tried to follow the recommendations on the Tiger Terrain website or to replicate the typically subtle colours that Simon Chick achieved with his Tiger Terrain models but my colours came out too yellow or too grey. In the end I found a balance that I thought looked nice, albeit more Cotswold than Calvados. 

I mostly used (relatively) cheap Deco Art craft paint from my local Hobbycraft. The base coat is Country Maple then a heavy dry brushing of Antique Gold - essentially yellow ochre. To break things up I dry brushed patches of Storm Cloud Grey and Sandstone then gave the whole a light dry brushing of a mix of Sandstone and Antique Gold to blend it in, finally adding some white for hi-lights.

Louis II de la Trémoille

Now I am catching up with actual painting progress - this is one of the most recent groups that I have painted. Louis de La Trémoille was one of the most prominent French Generals of the Italian Wars from Fornovo to his death at Pavia.

The figures are Minifigs - the current 3rd generation with some Milliput modifications to the gendarme and general's skirts and the gendarmes' horse barding as well as my usual replacement of the bendy lance with brass rod and Lilliput. Whilst the general and gendarme figures are pretty good, I don't think the bugler is anything like as nice a figure as the 2nd generation one which I used with Bourbon. Unfortunately there aren't many options for early 16th Century heralds. 

I have read that coats of arms were not worn by this time but the pictures I found of Louis all show him with an elaborately decorated tunic with his own arms and those of a Marshal of France so I was in two minds about it. In the end the fact that the model's tunic has a lot of creases persuaded me to believe the 'no heraldry' line.

Overall I was very pleased with these. I seem to have got the hang of varnishing and have had no problems with either a satin finish or white patches in the creases. 

Basing scheme

  

After a comment asking about what basing recipe I used, I thought it might be interesting to do a more detailed step by step post on basing.

I first used this scheme for my Italian Wars French army and the idea was to give a sense of Southern European ground - slightly sun-bleached rocky soil with patches of different grasses. I also think a paler basing scheme makes the figures stand out better. I used the same scheme for my terrain and that rather committed me to keep using it for other armies. Not a bad choice for my Late Romans to inherit but maybe less suitable for Normandy! 

Another objective was to be a reasonable match for my table. I bought my terrain mat some years ago from Antenocitis Workshop. It was called “Mat O War” and is a sort of very stiff synthetic felt - no chance of getting it to drape over hills! They told me they got them from Ireland and that it was made by compressing (presumably with some heat) the type of fibres used for static grass. They did two versions, a pale sand and the multi-tone green that I bought. The bad news is that I don't think it is available any more - in fact the Antenocities website no-longer seems to exist. 

The mat was an exact (as far as I can tell) match for their “DECORPLUS 2mm Gamer Grass Mix” and I originally used that for basing - the Kallistra static grass I use now is brighter, a single colour and more green so I dry brush a bit of yellow ochre to tone it down so the figure bases and scenery still match fairly well with the mat. 

As a final step, in preparing the figures for basing, I paint the cast figure's base with my base earth colour. This means I don't have to texture and paint right up to their feet when they are glued to the element base so makes the process a little easier.

My bases are 2mm laser cut MDF from Minibits or WarBases with self-adhesive 0.8mm magnetic sheet from Magnetic Displays. I stick the MDF base on the whole magnetic sheet, cut it off with a bit of excess then trim the magnetic sheet more closely with a sharp knife before sanding the edges to give a more or less seamless finish. Recently I've also been giving the underside a dusting of Halfords white primer to give a nice clean base for the unit name labels - also, for those without labels, it makes them less prone to sliding off hills.

I attach the figures with neat PVA adhesive. When that is dry, I fill in around the bases with a water-based filler. A coating of watered down PVA helps this adhere and I use a wet (old) brush to push the filler into place.

Next I paint the base with slightly diluted PVA, add a few small bits of rock and rounded sand grains (around 1mm) then sprinkle with fine sand, shaking off the excess immediately. When the PVA is dry, I brush off the bits that haven't fully adhered. I take particular care that there is nothing stuck around the edges.

Originally I used Humbrol Dark Earth as the base colour but I wanted to use the same mix for scenery and that would have been rather expensive so I bought a big tub of discontinued brown emulsion from B&Q. The colour isn't much like the Humbrol but that doesn't seem to matter to the final look. Being water based, it doesn't wet the textured surface as well as enamel paint diluted with white spirit so I usually need to do some touching up once the first coat is dry. There are usually a few bits of sand stuck by the emulsion around the edges so I remove those at this stage.

Dry brush acrylic yellow ochre, fairly heavily then more lightly with yellow ochre + white. Around the edges, I try to get an effect of vertical streaks rather than a simple dry-brushing and finish them off with some pale olive green - a match pot of emulsion. I find this helps the bases disappear into the terrain cloth and disguises the height of the base somewhat.

The larger rocks are painted with Vallejo London Grey then dry-brushed with Pale Grey. No real logic to this but it makes them stand out nicely. Although I try to be as neat as possible with all this, invariable a stray bit of basing paint gets on one or two figures, requiring some touching up.

The tufts are MiniNature 737-22 and the static grass is "Spring Meadow Flock" from Kallistra. As mentioned above, I dry brush over the Kallistra grass with yellow ochre to tone it down a bit.