Spanish Swordsmen

These are plastic figures for the board game Anno Domini 1666. I don't really care much about the game itself, but the figures look good, so I bought some of the expansion sets. They are useful for small urban skirmishes, or I can run the four swordsmen (including a NOT Viggo Mortensen Alatriste) for The Pikeman's Lament as a four figure Aggressive Forlorn unit.

Crimea River of Tartar Sauce

Off the painting desk ride a dozen Fireforge Games Mongols. I'm going to use them as Lithuanian or Crimean Tatars, they might not be totally historically accurate, but they are OK for representing these types of bow-armed raiders. They are in three groups of four, for my reduced figure count The Pikeman's Lament units, but they can be mixed as seen fit.

All Your Polish Cavalry Are Belong To Us

Here's all the (so far) planned and painted Polish cavalry for my 17th century big skirmish games.

A Town House for 'Dark Nights in Trashburgh'

After having the bare cardboard sitting on my windowsill for months, in the end I completed a scratchbuilt 28mm town house piece for my 'Dark Nights in Trashburgh' 17th century urban skirmish project. It is mostly made from cardboard, balsa wood, plasticard and texture paste for the walls.

Alfred Von Richthausen's Rote Reitter

As promised in my last post, I checked my new phone camera and it does a-okay. So I took the opportunity of fair weather today, and reinforced with camera flash, took photos of my freshly completed Warlord Cuirassiers.

Although I'm Hungarian and it's sort of against traditions, I like the concept of heavy cavalry in all of its forms. After attending a presentation on the subject before Christmas, I promptly got this box on my wish list. The Mrs and Santa coordinating their efforts, the dozen reiters were under the tree by the right time.

When I started painting the figures I had no clear concept in mind other than having one half with swords and one with pistols done. In good 'Cossacks: Back to War' tradition (where by default one faction is red and one is blue) my Imperialist infantry has a red/orange theme, so I chose to go with that. The rest is history.

Then the >>you know who<< arrived...

I managed to complete the full Warlord Games winged hussar box, eight metal figures in total. Most of the time was spent waiting for the paint and then the first layer of varnish to dry - I always do a double matt varnish on metal figures.

I think they are quite splendid, maybe a bit more for the 1683 and onwards campaigns, but I'll just use them for the earlier 17th century anyway. I'm not sure I could do the same with the TAG or Foundry hussars wearing chainmail (that is use them for the later periods).

The rank and file comrades are in two groups, one in yellow/buff and one in red garbs. I used the pennons sparingly, because the long lances should be broken to pieces on the target, so what's the point throwing those expensive cloths away?

TYW Imperialist Infantry - Warlord plastics complet'd

Great news everyone! A long time ago I got a bunch of Warlord plastic Pike &Shotte infantry sprues on one of their regular sprue sales. Well I'm proud to announce that I painted all of them. That's three sprues so 39 infantry, plus I added one from an earlier batch.

Eloise, Octavia and Three Doggos

 

Here are two female figures produced by the Polish company Wargamer: Eloise the Musketeer and Octavia the Cuirassier from their Hot &Dangerous line, to be used as character pieces in my 17th century games. Further, there are three Green Stuff World resin dogs.

As usual I spent a lot more time painting them than regular rank and file types. Eloise on the left received a succession of oil washes for example, so between the basecoat, varnish, wash and highlights there were about three weeks' worth of waiting time.

I only had to make minor modifications on the figures, such as chopping off the useless soft metal sword blades, and some filling work here and there. The casting of the metal is good quality and the parts fit well. Even though I shortened Eloise's boots a good length, she is still on the very tall side of the nominal 28mm scale, while Octavia is more proportionate, as you can see on the picture below.

Here they are with an Empress, Warlord and Bloody figure for scale comparison. The standing figures are pinned to a 25mm MDF base - they came with their own cast metal bases but I didn't like them very much. The dogs are nominally 1/56 scale but just may also be a little bit on the big side.

The boxer and beige dachshund are painted after family dogs. At Eloise's feet is the French bulldog Cardinal Richelieu, who is sadly not very well behaved and has to be yelled at constantly - for the amusement of the other Musketeers.

(As a disclaimer, I know that these types of dogs may not have existed in such form during the 17th century, but we can all agree to overlook that.)

A Return to Home Sculpting

 

I continue expanding my 28mm 17th century Eastern European collection. I just placed a hefty order with Warlord Games for that purpose. While they do not specifically carry much besides their Winged Hussars (of which I bought a box), their generic pike&shotte troopers are easy to convert or be used as dollies for more unconventional types.

However, that order has left my wallet a little bit bare, so instead of investing in another heap of lead, I turned to more economic solutions. I still have a lot of Green Stuff and Magic Sculpt, and also a bunch of Oyumaru/Blue Stuff for making press moulds.

I'm in awe of Master Tidmarsh's homecast figure collection, and started thinking along the same lines. However, I don't have a shed or other secluded place where I can tuck casting equipment safely away from pets, so I shall remain with my tried and tested method.

I made a previous post about experimenting with the thing, and learned a few things since:

1) The figure shall be cast without the arms attached.

2) The best end result occurs when you add a bit more resin to the mould than the volume of the casting, but just a little bit more to avoid excessive flash and/or distortion.

3) Applying constant, but not very strong pressure to the mould while curing makes a better result (as the oyumaru itself is a bit flexible).

4) Static poses where the figure can be easily 'cut in half' vertically generally work better.

With that in mind, I made a master sculpt from a Perry HYW archer's body and a Frostgrave crewman's head. All it needed was some filling, sanding, classic Cossack hairdo and a few buttons on the coat.

Now if you look at images of Cossacks, be it art or reenactors, you can see that their dress varies from the plain to the very garish, and I thought it's easier to have a very plain master and dress the figures up later once the basic one is cast.

So that's what I did, I made a pair of moulds and started producing clones of Oleg Basikovich. Fortunately I've got an abundance of spare arms and weapons, so the first four troopers and a sergeant are already complete and await their first lick of paint. As you can see it's rather easy to vary their headgear, add a longer overcoat or lacing etc.

My final goal is to build 2x8 pike-armed Cossacks and 2x8 with muskets, for the latter I'll use spare arms from the Warlord firelocks set. With the two moulds I can produce two to six figures a day, so it's not a far fetched goal at all. I also have some artillery crew and rabble foot in the making.

Later on I'll of course expand the collection with commercially produced figures, but these shall serve well as a core for my army.

The Cossacks Are Back to War

These are the Gripping Beast Arab Light Cavalry & Horse Archers figures converted to represent generic Eastern European 17th century cavalry. The figures do more or less lend themselves to that with their garb and weaponry, so all I did was use laced torsos and sculpt fur hats on the majority. For the lack of firearms I'll just suppose they are of the poorer type.

(The title of course harkens back to the now more than twenty years old Cossacks: Back to War PC game, playing which I spent countless hours.)

My crew is big and it keeps getting bigger

The Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago plastic crewmen set is kind of useful. The figures work well with swasbuckling adventure type games, and you get a lot of spare parts per sprue in the set you can use to kitbash other things. 

While they are kind of monopose and a bit on the smaller side of 28mm, and also require more prep work than, say, a Perry plastic figure, they are on the other hand easy to paint.

Battle Brother Captain Solidus Mercesius and Venerable Dreadnought Ladislaus Crassus

I finished two more of my salvaged Space Marines, bought used from the Troll Trader. They spent a few months in the stripping tub and turned out quite okay after the painting process.

They join my Turul Rangers custom chapter. I know technically the terminator guy is a lieutenant, not a captain, but he's humble enough.

Italian Wars - Milanese Horse and Landsknecht Arquebusiers

Continuing the Italian theme, this is the group of 28mm figures I managed to finish this month (including basing them): eight Warlord plastic Landsknecht shot and four Perry riders in Milanese livery.

Additional Scatter

Here's some more terrain pieces finished. You can see smaller ones, like the hand carts I started building earlier, a few resin barrels from Green Stuff World; linear objects, two sections of different plastered walls and a fence; a group of stakes liberated from the Perry HYW infantry set; and then a gun emplacement of four gabions.

Besides the barrels everything is scratchbuilt.

 

The gabions are cloned with green stuff from a single master. I made a press mould of the master, but instead of using a two-piece mould, I cut the bottom off and made hollowed out casts from GS using the butt end of a brush to spread it inside the mould. The compression actually helps the green stuff cure to a very firm finish. Once cured I pop the cast out of the mold and that's it. It works well for cylindrical objects and saves you some resin.

I put some dirt and toothpicks on top and used successive layers of drybrush for the paintjob. The base is also raised a bit with pieces of corkboard so figures don't have to duck that much behind. 

I think they look banged up enough, unlike some pristine injection moulded gabions would. There is a recast Bloody Miniatures matchlock placed at the inside (you can see it on the first photo).

Down on the Farm

Let me present to you the large terrain project I've been working on. It's a rural farm complex with a bunch of buildings and greenery. I sort of made it up on the go, so things are of a bit mixed styles, but I think they look good together.

Whatever floats your boat.

This month has mainly been about terrain projects. I might have mentioned that I've got some pirate themed gaming in mind, and for that I needed a longboat at least. (A one-mast ship with four guns is a work in progress.)

It's made out of balsa wood, the outer planks were soaked then bent to shape as with a plank-on-frame model ship. It includes six oar benches and forks, some equipment for longer voyages, and a swivel gun at the bow.

The pair of random Bloody Miniatures figs are just there for scale. 

Orks and Ork Accessories

I bought some used Ork Boyz a while ago, then stripped and painted them. A few of them were posted here before, but not the entire band. The rest are still available from the same place, so I might just buy more.

They also found a sort of VTOL ground attack craft and made it more orky.

The Second Batch of Steel Fist Knights

Finished four more Renaissance lance-armed knights produced by Steel Fist Miniatures. They are excellent sculpts and painted up well.

Hakkaa päälle!

These are three Warlord plastic cavalrymen, with minor conversion work. For my Pikeman's Lament (or other skirmish) games I wanted some sort of cavalry other than your usual harquebusier/cuirassier, badly equipped, untrained but motivated, all in all, something like the Finnish horse serving under Gustavus. 

Of course there must be a way then to discern these from their more respectable colleagues, so one of the figures received a Bloody Miniatures head swap with a fur hat, and the other two got copies of the same fur hat instead of a helmet or soft hat. The back of the figures' heads did have the end of a lobster tail sticking out (which the soft hat would have covered), so I put some extra green stuff there to cover it.

I think they look fierce enough, and will do their duties well until I can get some Cossacks or Croats. They have no pistols, and wear a basic brown buff coat.

The Whole Bloody Regiment

First post of the year, so happy New Year to all of my readers.

These are actually the leftovers of 2024's painting queue, as I ordered most of the figures back in April I think, so they took a while to complete.

Anyway, here's the entire batch of Bloody Miniatures foot figures, kind of looking like a rag-tag Swedish unit from the Deluge period (at least that was my intention) in an impromptu set-up of two wings of seven shot, two blocks of nine pike, extra officers and Spötte the dog.

By the way I collected the pebbles that decorate the bases in Stockholm (they use this kind of grout there for extra traction when it snows or freezes as far as I can tell), so the figures are definitely extra Swedish.