Another little distraction...

 

My New Year's resolution this year (and that seems a VERY long time ago now!) was to 'Finish Things', and by inference not get distracted by new and shiny projects. Those of you who know me well will be laughing already, as my list of projects is long, and largely unfinished, hence the resolution...

And I had been doing quite well, despite various temptations along the way. When I first heard of 'Never Mind the Billhooks' a few months ago I consoled myself that I already had a lot of 'Wars of the Roses' stuff form way back when, and the worst that could happen would be that I needed to rebase them. NMTB does use an unusual basing system, so when the rules were published I got out my old, largely Foundry, army and started having a look. And I even got some spare castings and painted them up - these are partly Foundry and partly Citadel IIRC...

But times have moved on, and the quality of sculpting has moved on, and more importantly I've got a bit better at painting, so I wasn't entirely happy with what I had. the ones below are from my older collection, and they tend to garish colours, which don't seem entirely medieval to my eye any more.

Luckily I had a couple of boxes of Perry Miniatures new plastics lying around, as you do, the Infantry set, and the continental mercenaries. These latter were brought with the idea that I might one day do the Battle of Stoke Field as it is local to me, and one of the few battlefields I have had time to walk in the past.

First efforts were a few crossbowmen, from the mercenary set:

... in NMTB they count as skirmishers, hence the bases, and I used fairly random livery colours. Martin Schwartz at Stoke Field had a largely German force, so I figured they might be in any colours. When I come to do some more pikemen from that set I will maybe go for a more Swiss blue and white combo.

Then for the main force I have so far managed some billmen and archers, this time in the Earl of Lincoln's colours of blue and yellow, for earlier parts of the wars they can be Suffolk's (his father), so effectively the same retinue:

I've also done a few accessories so far, to fit the game's options for defensive sharpened stakes, a Warbases cart for arrow supplies, and a few counters for arrow supply - see Stephen Woods blog which I basically copied for the counters..

So now I have the beginnings of an army, quite a few models left in my two Perry boxes, and a few Foundry castings which are still pretty good quality, but am going to get back to my main projects for a little while before the lure of these gets to me again...