Dark Age Village

I have now finished the rest of the buildings for the dark age village. They are made in the same style as the barn I posted earlier. There are one large house and two smaller – although to be honest, the smallest one is really more of a shed than a house.

Some more pictures of the buildings below with some saxons for scale.

All the roofs are of course removable.

Where's the loot?!

Well, I said the village is finished but I think it needs a little something extra ...  Stay tuned for next week!

Pictish Raiders

From the north they came ...

A month or so back, I realized I hadn't put up any pictures of the Pict raiding force I finished last year, so when I got the time I arranged some terrain and took some photos. Then things got in the way, as they have a tendency to do, and it took me a good while to sort out the pictures – but this week I finally took the time to finish the last few of them.

The whole warband ready to raid (click for larger image).

The force consists of the following models: one Lord with a champion and standard-bearer (the last one is for decoration only and have no effect in the Dux Britanniarum rules), one minor Noble, one group of four bow-armed skirmishers (should be crossbows according to the rules apparently, but there you go), one group of four skirmishers armed with javelins, one group of four skirmish cavalry and four groups of six raiders each.

Here is the Lord Gartnait son of Girom with his champion Caltram son of Uoret to his right. Behind him stands the trusty standard-bearer Lutrin and to the left stands proud Erip son of Domelch, a minor Noble.

Skirmishing cavalry, armed with javelins.

Skirmishers with bows.

Skirmishers with javelins.

First group of raiders.

Second group of raiders.

Third group of raiders.

Fourth group of raiders.

The miniatures are an eclectic mix of Black Tree Design, Gripping Beast, Old Glory and West Wind. Shield transfers and banner from Little Big Men Studios.

With the long (looong!) awaited Raiders supplement for the excellent Dux Britanniarum from Too Fat Lardies finally being about to be released – "in the beginning of April" is that I'm hearing – I'm getting very excited to at last be able to field this force.

Thanks for looking, have a great weekend everyone!

Dark Age Barn

It's been a bit quiet around here lately due to various boring personal stuff like being sick, parents visiting (no relation between the two though!) and whatnot. However, behind the scenes I've been working away at my current focus on painting and building terrain.

With two finished warbands, the Picts and the Saxons, eager to raid, I set to work on building something for them to plunder: a small Dark Age village. This barn or storage house is the first building to be finished. It's more or less an exact copy of the one described by Richard Clarke of Too Fat Lardies here, although I've not used the exact same materials.

The barn served as a sort of test piece, most notably for the painting, for the village. For this project I've used artists' colours from Liquitex and Daler-Rowney, which is a first for me. The paints are quite different than your usual miniature paints like Vallejo or Citadel, more like a not very opaque gel. It took a bit of experimenting before I got the hang of these colours, and found out which techniques to use. In the end, the result is quite nice I think.

Some more pictures below.

The roof is of course removable.

Not much to see indoors though ...

Some Saxon bad boys for scale.

"This barn is our barn."

In the scenarios for Dux Britanniarum that calls for buildings, the minimum amount needed is four, so that's what I'm aiming for. I have the other three buildings in various states of completeness, and might do an additional one or two.

Thanks for looking, have a great week everyone!

Salute 2014 – Here I Come

After some hard negotiations (well, not really) the flight, hotel and ticket for Salute 2014 are finally booked. This will be my first time attending the show and needless to say I'm really, really excited.

I'll be traveling with my fiancee and it will be a nice weekend trip for us, although I couldn't convince her to come with me to the show, which may be just as well – it will certainly be easier to hide the amount of money I'll spend ...

I'm looking forward to seeing all the great games on display, all the nice stuff I usually just see on the web pages of miniature companies and of course, all the latest releases. If you know of any exciting new stuff released at Salute, please let me know in the comments below. I'm trying to come up with a shopping list that isn't a mile long but a few more additions won't hurt, right? Right?

Hopefully, I'll also get to see some of you fellow bloggers there!

Wattle Fencing

Another not-very-exciting update this week as I continue my odyssey through the enclosures of history. This time: wattle fencing. This is the jolly nice plastic fencing made by Renedra. I've actually had them assembled (such as it was) and undercoated for a good while, but found them too wobbly. I planned on mounting them on bases to make them sturdier but never got round to it until now.

The whole lot. Nice, detailed kits, that didn't require too much cleaning up. These are the contents from two packs.

 
Some Saxons out and about.

A possible layout.

More Saxons on the loose.

So there it is – another versatile terrain kit added to the collection. Each section is approximately 125 mm long (approx 5 inches), which means the total length is around 1,5 meters. Should be enough!  I think these fences will see much use, especially in our Dark Ages gaming.

Thanks for looking – have a great week everybody!

Walls Come Tumbling Down

Not a very exciting update this week I'm afraid, as I've let the miniatures rest and instead painted up these walls I bought from an eBay vendor a couple of years back. They are in resin, quite nicely detailed and should work for a number of periods from Dark Ages to more modern times, as well as in fantasy gaming. The casting is unfortunately a bit on the dodgy side – small parts of the rubber mould had stuck to most of the pieces and there were quite a lot of air bubbles all over the them (which is noticeable in the close-ups below).

Consequently, there were quite a lot of cleaning up to do and to be honest I got so fed up in the end, I didn't even bother to fill in all the air bubbles. With all those cracks and details, it was also a bit of a challenge to undercoat the walls. However, I think they turned out pretty decent after all, especially once they were finished off in my usual basing style.

A picture of the whole set laid out:

The longest parts are approximately 160 mm long (approx. 6.4 inches), and the overall height is 22 mm.

A close-up of the parts of ruined walls:

To give a sense of scale/size, I let my Saxons pose for some action shots:

More Saxons in action:

I think the walls will be a nice addition to our terrain set-up. As I said, they're quite versatile, which is always a good thing of course.

Finally, the same shot as above but from a different angle:

Oh, right – bonus points for those of you who can spot the musical reference (without googling it!) in the title of this post ...

Thanks for looking!

Dark Ages Saxons 7

May I present to you the commanders of the Saxon warband: the ætheling Æescwine and his champion Ceowulf, accompanied by the adlings Eadric and Eadbald.

Noble, Lord, Champion and Noble.

These are the final miniatures for my Saxon warband for Dux Britanniarum. The models are all from Gripping Beast and may actually be off by a hundred years or so, more suitable for the 6th century than the 5th. However, I didn't like the look of the ones in the West Wind Miniatures command set, and the characters from Musketeer, while excellent sculpts, look a little too meek for my taste. So I went with these miniatures from good old Gripping Beast – they had just the right look of cold-blooded murderers I was going for, coupled with some excellent arrogant poses. And the Penda model is just so over the top, I had to use it for my warlord.

For the shields, I've used a new approach: the noble's shield is hand painted while the bird on the champion's shield is an overpainted transfer from Little Big Men Studios. It's not perfect by any means (most notably, I didn't manage to blend the edge of the transfer), but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out – especially for a first try – and I definitely plan on using this technique more in the future.

With these miniatures done, the whole warband is now finished. It's always a nice feeling completing a project, but I'm particularly pleased with this one as it took longer than planned. I will do a photo shoot with the whole force when I get the time. Hopefully, I will get to field them in a game soon too, as I think they're eager to steal some cattle and gold – and kick some Briton behind of course.

Thanks for looking!

Dark Ages Saxons 6

This week I have finished the second unit of gedrihts for my Saxon warband for Dux Britanniarum.

The miniatures are mainly from Musketeer Miniatures with one model from West Wind mixed in for a bit of variety (the miniature with the blue cloak in the pictures).

Shield transfers, as usual, from the great Little Big Men Studios. The shields are in the same style as the other unit's to set them both apart as elites.

This is the final regular unit for this warband, and all that's left to paint now are a couple of characters.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend everyone!

Dark Ages Saxons 5

After almost two months I can at last post another update to my Saxon project. I had just begun painting this unit when work hit me hard and this project was completely halted. But during the Christmas vacation I finally had the time to continue with these miniatures and here they are at last – the first unit of gedrihts, the elite warriors of the Saxons. As such they are suitably armoured up and clad in the some of the brightest coloured and finest patterned clothing this side of the Mare Germanicum.

The second miniature from the right is from West Wind,
the rest are from Musketeer Miniatures. 

The miniatures are from Musketeer and West Wind. To be honest, when it comes to these particular miniatures, the quality of the sculpts of former is leagues above the latter, but it's always nice with some variety in a skirimish warband.

Not a sight you are likely to see very often!

The shield transfers are from Little Big Men Studios. I went for a sort of unified look with the shields, to try and tie the warriors together as a unit.

Tough guys spoiling for a fight. And a good look
at the lovely shield transfers from LBMS.

The second unit of gedrihts is on the painting table at the moment, and should be ready next week.

Thanks for looking! Have a great week everyone!

Projects for 2014

Well, I hope you all had a great New Year's celebration and that you've had a good first few days of 2014.

As is the tradition, with 2013 all behind us, I will take a look forward to the coming year and what it might bring.

Last year I set myself a goal to play at least 26 games, which I managed to do. But even though I loved playing lots of games, by having set a target it sometimes felt a bit forced. I don't know if that makes any sense? Anyhow, for 2014 I will not set a new goal, but rather play lots of enjoyable games, simple as that. I will however endeavour to try at least one new rule set and one new period I haven't played before.

I also really want to visit Salute in London in April, and among other things hopefully meet some of my fellow bloggers. There are no definite plans for this at the moment, but if all goes well it could be happening.

As for painting, my plan is for a modest three (or four, depending on how you count them) projects for this year. However, before I start on any of these new projects I will finish the Saxons for Dux Britanniarum. Not much left to do on those though ...

And so, without further ado, my planned projects for 2014 are:

Odds and sods, bits and bobs, misc etc

After finishing several large projects at work at the end of last year, I'm a bit weary of starting any new large hobby projects. Instead I plan to do some smaller stuff, to get a chance to paint various things and help me get my inspiration back again. Then, when I'm back in my usual groove, it's time to tackle the heavy stuff.

The "smaller stuff" will be a mix of wagons/baggage, livestock, some civilians, markers for casualties and loot, and also some small terrain pieces. I've thought about doing some "larger small stuff", eg more terrain, for a while now and this might get lumped into this project if I feel like it. But mainly I'll do small, fun stuff, that's quick to finish.

Italian Wars

This one might not come as a surprise for those of you who have managed to piece together the clues scattered about – most notably the Landsknecht casualty markers.

Most (if not all) of my projects are of the small-scale skirmish type, and for a while now I've felt the need to take the next step and do a bigger project that will let me play larger games – eg Hail Caesar in the "proper" scale". I've also felt a bit bored with my drab painting style for the Dark Ages and felt it was time to shake things up a bit and paint something more colourful. In short: I needed a challenge.

Cue the Italian Wars.

Large armies – check. Colourful armies – check.

As luck would have it, Dalauppror started doing his wonderful Landsknechts/German mercenaries for his Kalmar Union War project. These would work perfectly as the core of a force for the Italian Wars. Suddenly I had an opponent too!

We're still ironing out the details for this project, but it's more or less decided we're going for the early part of the conflict, focusing on Charles VIII's invasion of Italy in 1494 and the Battle of Fornovo in 1495 (we might be able to use roughly the same forces for slightly later periods of the conflict, up to and around 1500, but I need to read up on this a bit more before we decide anything). I will once again do the glorious French, while Dalauppror will have to come up with some way for his Swedish allmoge to masquerade as an Italian condotta army (OK, that last bit was a joke!).

If we're lucky, we might have some other guys from the club doing small forces as well, which will allow us to eventually play some larger games.

This is long-time project for me that won't be finished this year: I envision the result to be a large army with many miniatures, but to not lose inspiration, my plan is to build it up in stages. For 2014, my primary goal is to do the core troops and have a playable army: a couple of units of gendarmes, a couple of units of Swiss mercenaries, some hand gunners, perhaps some mounted crossbowmen and of course – some artillery!

The rules we are looking at at the moment is Pike and Shotte (but we might change our minds if something better shows up), as we really like the fast, action-packed games of Hail Caesar we have played. 

Romano-British

Continuing my (other) long-term project of painting up all the starter forces for Dux Britanniarum, it's time to tackle the proud Romano-British. This should be a simple and straightforward project.

Secret Project

I'll keep this one under wraps for a while, as it's more fun this way. However, I will say as much that it's got some things in common with a few of my earlier projects but with a decidedly Mediterranean touch. The plan is to adopt a certain published rules-set to this new setting, and I aim to paint up two small(ish) forces to start playtesting with, and then add more stuff as I go along and develop this further.

Well, there they are – my plans for 2014. Let's see how well I can stick to them! There's already a new project not among those listed above that might take up a lot of time during the year ...