Managed to find time to paint up a couple of ECW artillery bases for For King & Parliament. Guns and figures are all 15mm from Peter Pig and, as usual, they’re painted with GW Contrast Paints.
These have come out quite nicely, and will form the centrepiece of the next scenario in my fictional North Wessex campaign.
More for my ECW armies: a unit of Dragoons.
In For King & Parliament, my chosen ruleset for the period, Dragoons are small unit compared to a standard infantry battalia: effectively a cavalry unit dismounted less a few chaps to hold the horses. I’ve already decided a Forlorn Hope as being eight figures strong, so given your standard battalia is 24 figures strong, the Dragoons are somewhere in the middle at 12 figures strong.
I’m not actually going to paint up mounted versions or horse-holders because, as I understand it, there was only one encounter where Dragoons fought mounted, so best to avoid ahistorical fielding by not having any on horseback. That’s my excuse anyway!
These are 15mm Peter Pig figures painted (quickly) with GW Contrast Paints. Note the chap next to the purple flower in the picture above. He’s a good example of something you have to watch out for with Contrast Paints: missing a bit! Because the paints flow like a wash, it’s often easy to forget to use a proper brush (i.e. not a wash brush) and work the paint into the relief (the creases) in a figure. If you just dab the paint on like a wash, sometimes it will run away from where you’ve dabbed it a few seconds after you’ve done the dabbing, which if you’re painting multiple figures on a lolly-stick can mean that you miss what’s happened because you’ve moved on to the next figure. I shall have to re-open the box and fix him!
Incidentally, I had started thinking that I’ll never finish this English Civil War project, but then I realised that the reason it was taking me so long to complete, the reason why I had painted so many figures compared to other armies, was that I was painting enough of the same sort of figure (as the sides are relatively homogeneous) for to field both sides in a game…so painting two armies or one double-sized army. Doh!
Finally, today, regular visitors will know that I’ve set myself a task of interspersing my new project painting with clearing some of my rather sizable lead mountain. Here’s what I did - to do my duty! - just before painting the Dragoons:
It’s one of those objective markers the size of a Battlefront large base. Don’t know why I had it, or what I’ll use it for, but that (tiny) corner of the lead mountain is now flattened!
Lockdown does definitely mean more time for painting, and I’m adding units to the 15mm ECW collection almost as fast as I can buy the raw lead!
Today’s offering consists of two parts.
First up is a standard infantry battalia but, for the first time, with the figures from Hallmark rather than Peter Pig:
These were actually easier to paint than Peter Pig: they are very un-fussy figures, with everything that needs to be painted clearly defined. As per usual, I used GW Contrast Paints, apart from the metalwork, painting eight figures of the same type at the same time.
I like to swap between ranges, provided the sizes match: a change is as good as a rest, as they say.
I like the way the Contrast red has left all the buttons a much lighter shade than the surrounding cloth: I can’t imagine what it would be like to hand-finish every one. Well, I can actually: very tedious!
Next up is a few of the offs and ends that you need to play the game itself: two Light Gun markers and one officer (a Colonel). I haven’t positioned the officer figure very well in the photograph: you can only see half his profile!
The gun markers are Peter Pig; the officer himself is from Hallmark, with his mounted flag bearer from Essex.
As regular visitors will know, I’m trying to take advantage of the extra painting time available during lockdown by interspersing my main projects with clearing a bit of the lead mountain.
After having completed the platoon of Hawkmen from The Scene, who had been perched on the lead mountain’s upper slopes for some time (see post last Friday), it was time to get back to my English Civil War armies with another unit of Dutch-style horse.
Like the last unit painted, these are 15mm Hallmark figures from Magister Militum: a close match in size to the Peter Pig figures which, so far, have formed the bulk of the collection.
I decided to try and paint dun-coloured horses this time: using the GW Contrast Aggaros Dunes colour straight from the bottle and then blacking the legs, manes and tails. It seems to have worked quite well, turning out a bay dun or buckskin dun colour.
As an experiment, I also undercoated in the ‘official’ grey undercoat as opposed to the usual white. That worked quite well, as the grey doesn’t show through so much if you miss a bit. Didn’t really notice much difference to the colours though.
One thing I did notice, however, was that the Contrast Black colour is quite fragile i.e. the least scrape across the tails would take some of it off, leaving said undercoat showing through on the most raised bits. In the end I gave each horse a quick stroke of normal black paint straight down the tail which solved the problem. A pity, though, as the hair on dun coloured horses is rarely pure black: it tends to have medium dark brown strands as well, and the pure Contrast black simulated a non-block-black quite well.
The rest of the figures were also painted with Contrast Paints, except for the sleeves in white. I had to use normal acrylic white over the grey undercoat as the Contrast white didn’t really do anything: just came out a bit dingy. Contrast white over Warithbone white in future, I think.
Right, with another “main project” unit done, off to the lead mountain to see what I can find to paint up next.
Not commuting every day has certainly increased my painting output, so it was time to start a project that’s been on my mind since before Christmas.
Regular visitors will know that I play the Ancients game To The Strongest using 15mm figures on a 15cm grid. This way, I can use the armies that I originally put together for Vis Bellica on 6cm frontages by using two VB units for one TTS unit. This has meant a lot of investment in my old VB armies: effectively doubling the size of each or, where “deep” units such as Hoplites and Warbands are concerned, quadrupling the number of bases needed.
One of the last armies to need the TTS expansion treatment is my 100YW English army: knights, longbows and billmen. The trick here was going to be matching the figures and paint schemes that I had used before.
Figures weren’t so much of a problem…once, that is, I’d remembered (i.e. searched the Internet until I got a match) that I’d used Museum Miniatures for the core of the VB army. Paints would have to be as close as I could get with the originals using Contrast Paints.
Here’s the first two contributions: a command stand and an element of longbows:
I also managed to find time to complete a second unit of Commanded Shot for my ECW armies. As with the other, these were Peter Pig figures in 15mm.
I’ve also just had another delivery of Hallmark figures so (once the wife has wiped the package down with Dettol!) it’ll be on to more Dutch Horse.
Here is the first of the two Commanded Shot battalia that I have planned for my ECW collection.
These are 15mm figures from Peter Pig, painted with my now usual Contrast Paints from GW.
One more battalia of these to go, and then I’ve broken the back of the infantry that I need. I’ll probably paint up another couple of standard battalia to allow for the odd bigger game, but the main hurdle still to come is the Dutch Horse: 4-5 units of nineteen cavalry each. Other than that, it’s the fun stuff that gives you quick gratification as it doesn’t take long to finish a piece: artillery, officers, attachments and the like.
I need Dragoons as well, but can’t decide whether to paint up the entire mounted-horseholder-foot mixture required for a full representation, as I read that in the ECW, Dragoons only ever fought mounted once. I shall have to see how keen I am on painting up even more ECW when I get to that point.
I managed to get a bit more painting done over the bank holiday weekend: just a few bits and pieces rather than anything major.
First up, a unit of Cretan Archers for my Greek and Macedonian armies:
These are from Museum Miniatures’ excellent Z Range of CAD figures. Really nice and highly recommended.
Then there are a couple of officer stands for For King & Parliament: a General and a Colonel.
These are the always-dependable Essex figures in 15mm. I think I went bit over the top with the costume on the Colonel’s flag-bearer, but have compensated by making the General’s costume quite muted.
Regular visitors will know that I am currently building a collection of 15mm ECW figures with which to play For King & Parliament.
In FK&P, cavalry generally comes in one of two formations: the more modern, single-line Swedish style; or the more archaic, double-line Dutch style. So far I have painted up quite a few units of Swedish horse, but no Dutch.
All my ECW troops are based in big elements: bases that are roughly 12cms wide and 6cms deep, with a foot battalia being 24 figures (plus command). A Swedish style unit of horse is 9 figures (plus command) strong, a Dutch style unit therefore 16 figures (plus command) strong.
Big bases!
I was worried that differentiating between Dutch and Swedish styles needed more than just figures on a base, so wanted to try a different manufacturer as well. I also needed a break from painting Peter Pig figures (the vast majority of the army so far): not because I don’t like them any more, quite the opposite, but just to get a bit of variety in the brushwork.
The first manufacturer I tried was Blue Moon: lovely figures, so I ordered some cavalry, but when they came, they were distinctly larger than the Peter Pig cavalry that I already had. I mean grossly larger: they just would not do. I’m all for mixing and matching (people are different sizes after all) but this was ridiculous.
Off to the Internet, and I discovered this excellent blog post from the charmingly-named Madaxeman in which he posts pictures of all the different types of pike and shot infantry figures available. This was very useful, so I carefully scrolled down to where the Peter Pig figures started to appear and checked out which other manufacturer matched them for size.
There were some real horrors on the sizing and quality of figures front, but the two potential matches were with the Naismith line and/or the Hallmark line from Magister Militum. I couldn’t work out whether the Naismith line was still available to buy, which left MM’s Hallmark line as the range of choice.
And the winners are…Peter Pig on the left, Hallmark on the right.
An order and some nice prompt delivery later, and I had the figures for a unit of Dutch horse to paint up. The figures looked quite ornate to me, so I decided to make this first unit very much a unit of gentleman cavalry:
I’m very happy with these, so another order has gone off to Magister Militum (I can remember the first show they were ever at, just after they opened) for more horse and, this time, some infantry as well.
Looking at the MM website, you can ignore a lot of the detail and paint the cavalry in plainer colours, so that’s what I’m going to with this next unit.
And how do they compare with the Swedish horse. Here’s how:
Very good: exactly the effect I was after. I’m now off to wait for the postman…
My ECW collection is coming along nicely: today’s addition is a third battalia of pike-heavy foot.
As usual, these are 15mm Peter Pig figures painted with GW Contrast Paints and mounted as one element on a Warbases’ Vehicle Base. The flowers are from Boontown.
I’m intending to use these for For King & Parliament, the ECW version of To The Strongest, hence why they will work well as a single base of figures.
What I need to do now is to swap my efforts onto the units of Dutch-style horse that my collection requires.
The main difficulty is that I would like to make the Dutch horse even more distinctively different to the Swedish-style horse I already have, so have been looking around for a different manufacturer to try.
I did try Blue Moon, who have some very nice figures, but they are distinctly bigger than the Peter Pig ones, especially the horses, so don’t really fit. I’m usually pretty tolerant about different figures sizes (after all, you do get a variety of sizes in real life), but these are really very much bigger. So if anyone wants a few packs of unpainted, untouched Blue Moon ECW horse, I’m happy to look at swapping them for something. E-mail me at the usual address (right hand column gives it).
Off to the Internet to see what I can find…
I think that Cuirassiers in the full plate sense might have been dying out by the time of the English Civil War, but the book assures me that I might need a smallish unit for some scenarios, so it was off to the Internet to buy some figures and then to paint them.
These are 15mm Peter Pig figures painted using GW Contrast Paints. The horses are Cygor Brown thinned down 50/50 with the Contrast Thinner. The armour is Templar Black very lightly dry-brushed with Leadbelcher, except for the commander at the far end, who has a light dry brush of a dark gold colour.
The unit is shown as a Dutch- rather than the more modern Swedish-style formation i.e. two ranks deep relying on brute force rather than one rank deep relying on firepower. It’s still a smallish unit: being only four figures wide rather than the usual nine (which is going to make the larger Dutch-style units very heavy indeed at 18 cavalry figures to a base!).
The bases are Warbases vehicle bases flocked all over. The flowers are from Boontown, and are absolutely excellent.
All this Working From Home (WFH) has given me time to finish off a couple of pike and shot units that have been sitting on the painting table for a bit. It’s all down to no commuting time: gives me an extra 2½ hours a day.
Anyhow, here’s another battalia of pike-heavy infantry:
And a small unit of Swedish Horse to represent Lifeguards or some such:
Both units are 15mm Peter Pig, and all painted with GW Contrast Paints. The pikes were from North Star Figures.
I’m still slowly working my way through what I need to field a decent sized English Civil War army.
Today’s unit is the first of the pike-heavy foot battalia i.e. where there are equal numbers of pikemen and musketeers in the unit rather than the more usual 2:1 ratio in favour of musketeers.
These are Peter Pig figures in 15mm painted, as usual, with GW Contrast Paints.
I wasn’t sure how to represent the difference between standard and pike-heavy units: I wanted something that could be seen easily on the tabletop without the need for additional markers.
I had thought of narrowing the unit by putting the extra pikemen in a third rank in the centre but, in the end, settled just for keeping the same shape of unit. Looking at a standard and pike-heavy unit next to each other, I’m quite happy with the way they compare: the difference is subtle but obvious.
Finally had time to finish off the first batch of command stands for For King & Parliament. These are all 15mm Essex figures painted mostly with GW Contrast Paints.
I must admit that I’m quite pleased with the way these have turned out.
Here’s everyone busy playing IABSM left right and centre, and all I can find the time for is to paint and build a little bit of terrain!
As regular visitors will know, I’m currently putting together English Civil War forces to use with For King & Parliament. I’ve already finished enough standard troops to play one side of the sample scenario in the rulebook, the Battle of Montgomery, but hadn’t had the chance to complete any command figures. Until now, that is, so here is the first command stand: Colonel-level, so two figures.
These are 15mm Essex figures. I’m using Peter Pig for the troops, Essex for the command stands, and mostly GW Contrast paints to, er, paint them with.
Nice figures, although I couldn’t quite work out what the thing the Colonel himself was wearing on his chest. I’ve painted it as a sort of yellow/gold braid effect on top of a red waistcoat, but now I note that the painted version on the Essex site has it as a sort of chainmail vest. No matter: at three foot away, what’s the difference!
I also needed some buildings to represent a village in the second scenario I want to play, so found these rather spectacular “Timber-Framed Houses” from 4ground Publishing.
These come in the usual flat-pack format, but are relatively easy to build: I did all four in a single evening. They are also very tolerant of idiots: you can’t see it, but I completely mucked up one build and, as I idiotically use Superglue when putting things like this together, trying to fix any mistakes can be…testing, shall we say. Despite my cackhandedness, I think you have to agree how good they look, and that’s straight from the packet: I’m sure that better modellers than I can customize them to look even better.
Anyway, that’s four lovely houses done and dusted. Price for all four was £47 plus postage: which I think is a fair price considering I now have all the buildings I need for a 2-4 square FK&P town.
Here’s a close-up of one of the timber-framed cottages:
I’ve almost got enough figures now to field the Parliamentarians at the Battle of Montgomery, 1644: the sample scenario that appears in the For King and Parliament rulebook.
Today’s contribution to the total is a couple of units of helmeted Swedish Horse accompanied by two Gallant Gentlemen on foot.
The cavalry are all Peter Pig figures, the foot are Essex. All are 15mm and mostly painted with GW Contrast Paints.
I’m very pleased with the horses. As I couldn’t find a good horse-brown straight from a Contrast pot, I decided to experiment and buy the Contrast thinner and then see what happened when I did a 50/50 mix with Contrast Cygor Brown.
My main concern was what to mix them in, but then daughter number two gave me a little pot that she bought from the art shop for doing exactly this, and the problem was neatly solved. In went half a centimetre of Cygor Brown, in went the same amount of thinner, a quick shake and the brown you see on the models above is one coat of the mixture with no highlighting over Wraithbone primer. All I did do was paint the manes, tails and lower legs in undiluted Cygor Brown. Very quick and very easy. I shall be trying this sort of thing again…once I work out the best time to nip into my daughter’s room and steal the rest of her mixing pots!
There do seem to be an awful lot of “Swedish Horse” units required for my first ECW army: the Parliamentarians at the Battle of Montgomery (the sample scenario in the rulebook).
Here’s another unit finished:
The figures above are all 15mm Peter Pig.
I also needed some “Gallant Gentlemen”: the For King & Parliament equivalent to heroes in To The Strongest. Here are a couple of mounted GG’s: both 15mm from Essex.
Here’s the last painting of 2019: a couple of things I haven’t had time to photograph until now.
First up is another unit of “Swedish” horse for my English Civil War army:
These are 15mm Peter Pig figures painted with GW Contrast paints. I do like the Peter Pig figures - they have a lot of character and paint up nicely - but I do wish you didn’t have to spend so much time getting the horse stands to actually stand up.
And here’s a close up:
And finally here are a couple of figures that I painted up literally to hit the 2,000 point mark! They are two Onslaught Beserker figures from Nuclear Shrimp Games’ Brute range. Although the range is technically 15mm, the idea is that they are huge mutants, so the figures themselves are a good size 28mm.
My ECW armies are based on one figure = twenty men i.e. a foot battalia of about 500 men is represented by 24 figures plus three command figures. That allows me to show the difference between a standard battalia, a pike-heavy battalia, an all-pike battalia, and a commanded shot battalia just by varying the ratio of musketeers to pikemen.
Similarly, a horse regiment of about 200 men is represented by nine figures plus two command figures, with the difference between Swedish, Dutch and Cuirassier formations being shown by the way the figures are placed on the base: one line for Swedish horse, two lines for Dutch horse, with Cuirassiers being a smaller unit altogether.
How then to represent a Forlorn Hope: a much smaller foot unit of around only 150 men?
I have settled on using just eight figures, plus two command figures, which makes one of my big bases look very empty indeed:
For certain Forlorn Hope units, if only for variety, I am going to do a little diorama. Here’s a very simple one involving just mounting the figures behind a couple of sticks:
Looks good!
Here’s another unit for my growing English Civil War contingent. Regular readers will know that I am basing each individual unit on a single base with a 12cm frontage: proper elements!
This unit is a regiment of so-called Swedish Horse. Not that they actually hail from the land of IKEA: it’s all to do with their fighting formation and technique.
These are Peter Pig figures in 15mm painted with GW Contrast paints. A single line of nine figures plus two command figures forward.
As this year’s Painting Challenge draws to a close, I am frantically trying to hit my target of 2,000 points. I’m currently on 1,947 so, as I paint in 15mm, have four days to paint 53 figures or nine vehicles. That’s quite a tough prospect, but I can’t get this close only to fall at the final hurdle!
Here’s another English Civil War battalion to help me on my way:
The figures are all 15mm Peter Pig, painted with GW Contrast Paints.
Vis Lardica is a website devoted to wargaming and military history, with a special emphasis on the company-sized rulesets produced by the TooFatLardies: I Ain't Been Shot Mum (WW2); Charlie Don't Surf (Vietnam); and Quadrant 13 (science fiction)
Welcome to Vis Lardica, a not-for-profit website mostly dedicated to the company-sized wargaming rules produced by the TooFatLardies, but encompassing my other gaming interests as well.
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