French Valois Arquebusiers

Having looked around for a while for suitable figures, I bought a bag of Old Glory generic arquebusiers RGE6 from Time Cast Models.

I painted up the first batch with a limited range of colours but they looked too much like Landsknechts and I didn't like that they all wore identical hats. So, after seeking some advise on the Miniatures Page, I modelled a selection of new hats and helmets with Miliput. The first ones were rather clunky but I was quite happy with the later ones. The officers are a couple of spare sword and bucker men from Venexia and Essex modified a bit to give them similar headgear to the others and remove the baggy pantaloons on the Venexia figure.

Once painted and mixed in with standard figures, this gave much more of the look I had wanted.

Making lances

I originally posted an explanation of my lance-making process on the Slithering FOG-R board last year - I'm playing catch up with this blog to get to the current state of my painting progress.

It sounds a long process but each step is quick and, if you do a few together, it doesn't take long at all.

I use 0.8 mm brass wire. After shaping the point and cutting them to length, I mix up some Milliput and roll some into a long, thin (about 1mm dia) sausage. I cut a piece (about 30 mm long, IIRC) and wrap it around the lance in a spiral, starting with the spirals close together at the hand-end and widening the helix towards the point. I then roll the lance ona smooth cutting mat. Surprisingly this spreads the Milliput around the wire core very evenly, keeping the wire central. Then I set them aside to cure. Before the Milliput is absolutely hard, I cut the step for the hand with a sharp knife - doing it then avoids the risk if chipping or fracture.

Here is a photo of the lance making process:

For sanding the lance to final shape, I hold the lance in a pin vise. Rough shaping is with a file to give a uniform cone then with folded-over sand paper wrapped around a dowel to give the flared profile (the nose of the vise helps with this) and smooth surface.

The extra-long ones are for Essex figures, to compensate for needing an extra few mm below the hand. Although it makes the proportions wrong, I prefer to have the extra stability of having the lance glued to the figure at two points.

I painted about half the lances with the 'barber's pole' spiral pattern. Tis was also done in a pin vise, free hand, painting a bit then rotating 45 degrees or so and painting a bit more. You can actually do multiple steps, equally spaced for each rotation. If you look close enough, the spirals aren't that neat: I use a three shade method so the boundary from one colour to the other is softened, averages out and looks smooth. It takes a bit of practice but the method is quite easy. One thing to look out for is that to keep the spiral thickness about the same, the helix needs to change as the diameter reduces. The sad thing is that I suspect the barber's pole lances were not used in battle but they look pretty.

Essex Gendarmes

I have rather mixed feelings about these figures. They are very cleanly cast with good detail but most of the horses have a rather heads-down defeated pose and the thick, cast-on lances are held out to the side in what looks a very uncomfortable pose. Some of the figures are perfect for French Gendarmes but others are more Germanic looking and one had what looks more like a jousting helmet than the typical close helmet / armet.

One of the horses has barding straight out of the Triumph of Maximilian - although very well done, it just doesn't look like the smoother style of barding seen used by French Gendarmes in the Pavia Tapestries and the Voyage de Genes. I wish in hindsight that I had remodelled this with Miliput.

As with the previous group of Minifigs and Asgard / TTG Gendarmes, I replaced the lances with wire/Miliput and bent the arms to bring them closer to the body.

More Gendarmes

My lead mountain contained some more, unpainted 2nd and 3rd generation Minifigs and old Asgard gendarmes and painting another couple of units of Gendarmes was next on my jobs to do list. I only had enough figures for one unit so I sent off for a dozen Essex gendarmes to try to get more variety. When these arrived the difference in build was far too much to mix them in with the smaller and thinner Minifigs and Asgard/TTG figures in the same unit, though I thought they would look OK on the table together. 

One problem was the huge difference in their lances. I normally replace spears, pikes and lances with brass wire but plain wire doesn't look much like a late-medieval / renaissance lance, even with the blobs of epoxy that had seemed OK as a hand guard when I painted my old unit of gendarmes. Eventually I found a fairly quick and effective way of making replacement lances with brass wire and Milliput. I posted a how to for this some while ago on the Miniatures Page and will re-post it on here at some point - it is quite easy and nothing like as fiddly as it sounds. The end-result isn't perfect but they don't bend, and are better proportioned than the chubby telegraph poles cast on some figures. Most importantly it gives enough of a uniform appearance to allow figures from different manufacturers to be mixed without looking ridiculous. 

Part way through painting these, whilst looking for inspiration in contemporary illustrations and on some the excellent blogs of 28mm Italian Wars miniatures, I noticed that the rider's skirts weren't quite right, being too small and not covering the back of the saddle so I modified the later ones with Milliput.

Old Gendarmes

Taking stock of my Gendarmes figures, I had a variety of figures painted but only enough for one FOG-R unit with three left over. 

Here is a picture of those original 1980s figures. They are a mix of old Minifigs Gendarmes (back row, left as we look at the picture) and Archers (front row, left) with Asgard / TTG French Gendarmes (front, 2nd from left) and Pensioners (no plumes, 3rd & 4th from left in the front). I had mixed up the horses to get more variety. I must have added to them a bit later because there were also a couple of the current (1990s?) Minifigs Early 16th C French Generals and one of their horses used to mount the third from left figure in the front rank.

I had replaced the various bendy lances with wire but my attempts to make them look like lances rather than spears was limited to a blob of Araldite in lieu of a lance guard and pennants.

The trouble is, the more I looked at contemporary illustrations, the less satisfied I was with these figures. With gradually evolving hindsight: the lances didn't look right, giving them pennants was a mistake, the horse barding didn't match (what are those fringes about?) and, though you can't see in this photo, the distinctive 'skirts' covering the back of the saddle were absent. In fact the old Minifigs gendarmes looked like they were wearing 3/4 length baggy culottes. 

I had enough unpainted (or badly painted) figures for another one and a half units and I decided I wanted to do better with these.

Landsknechts

I wanted a big keil, for FOG-R, with 12 bases of pikes and 2 of heavy weapons. I already had 32 pikemen painted (to varying standards, none too good) - a mix of three old Minifigs figures and an Asgard / TTG unarmoured pikeman and had some more unpainted but I wanted more variety for the pikes, some heavy weapons and musicians.

I bought some current Minifigs armoured pikemen to give more variety to the front rank and some Freikorps figures from QRF. The Freikorps figures mixed in really well and had good detail but some of the officers and halberdiers had very spindly weapons (probably accurate scale diameter, rather than the stubby telephone poles that most figures clutch) which had gaps in the casting. I made replacements for these with brass wire and solder. I also replaced all the cast pikes with brass wire.

Landsknechts

I stripped and repainted the worst of the original figures but just tidied up the others. I had a lot of trouble varnishing these figures and it ended up with too thick, obscuring the detail and with a rather satin finish.

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.