Italian Wars French 2 – Reisläufers 2

Here are the next two bases of pike armed mercenaries for my French army for the Italian Wars. They are either Landsknechts or their Swiss counterpart Reisläufers.

I actually finished these earlier in the summer, but I just now took the time to finally photograph them.

The miniatures are from Foundry, the classic sculpts by Alan Perry, and I have to say I like them a lot. The models looked a bit dodgy in the bare metal, so I wasn't too sure about them, but they painted up really, really nice. In my opinion they certainly hold up well against the much more recent Pro Gloria.

After posting up the first batch, I got some comments on the basing – more specifically some people thought they looked too regular and ranked up, and lacking that "push of pike" feeling. In hindsight, I do agree and for these new bases I tried to position them in a more irregular manner. I think they look much better for this.

As you may remember, I had some problems with the first bunch I painted using the straight Foundry triad system. For the new models I reverted back to my standard method, relying more on washes and sharper highlights. As a result, I'm much more happy with the look of these. The problem now is of course they have a slightly different look than the first bases – a bit darker or dirtier and with more contrasts between the layers. I haven't yet decided if the difference is too noticeable or if I can pass them off OK.

Here are some shots of the finished bases to date. You can clearly see the difference in painting styles.

Lots of pointy stuff.

I will not field the pike block like this, but nevertheless it's nice to get a feel for the finished unit.

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you'll have a great week!

Back Again

Well, hello again dear readers. I'm not sure any of you have actually noticed my absence but once again it's been awfully quite around here for a while. You can chalk that up to the very nice – but very, very hot! – Swedish summer. I've been away on vacation for a while, visiting my family among other things. Since we came back to Stockholm we've mostly been doing day trips to the beach as it's just been too hot to do anything else.

However, I have managed to get some painting done, and finished a couple of more bases of Reisläufers/Landsknechts, but overall my painting pace has been very slow as even in the evenings it's mostly been far too hot to paint. Needless to say, my blogging hasn't been very prolific either.

Last week I got back to work, while thankfully the temperature dropped to more manageable degrees, and hopefully I can get my act together and take some snaps of the newly painted miniatures later this week.

Usually when projects start to slow down my mind keeps wandering to new stuff, and I get all sorts of ideas for projects – pouring over blogs, fora, books and whatnot and making grand plans that usually involve expanding the lead pile ever more ... This summer has been no exception as I've struggled to get some momentum to the Italian Wars project and consequently my inspiration to pick up the brushes has slowly been dropping.

This time it was a trip to a certain church (seen at the top of this post) not far from where I grew up that provided the spark for a new project. This church was built by a family that had major impact on the course of Swedish history during the 12th and 13th centuries – and indeed well beyond that. This visit, which really deserves a post of its own, and some brushing up on my knowledge of Swedish history for this period has got me thinking about possible gaming projects.

I now have an idea of what I want to do, but as our new baby is due in October I suspect my hobby time will be close to nonexistent for the rest of the year. So I'm afraid this one will have to be filed away for the future.

There is another (smallish) project though, that I'm just about to start, that hopefully will give me a much needed boost of energy with regards to painting. But more on that in a later post ...

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you have a nice week!