More Men at Arms

Well I've managed to get two more men at arms done over the last few weeks. They seem to have taken a long while as I've been fitting them in around archery stuff as well as making a concerted effort to improve my borderline awful French before we go away in a few months. Anyway I thought it could be nice to do one of the surcoated bodies (less plate armour to paint!) however I didn't want to just do them as retainers, I quite fancied tracking down some of the Lorrainer knights who fought with Rene and using their heraldry. So after a great amount of digging and several loose ends I discovered Oswald Von Thierstein - who had fought at the battle of Morat & Nancy with Rene.

I found this image first, from some sort of greeting card (you can get it as a phone case if you really want!) which shows Oswald on his horse and surcoated. I wasn't sure on how accurate the heraldry was, but I then found this when looking for the Von Thierstein heraldry:

.. I thought I may as well use it as a basis, even if it possibly isn't bang on with accuracy. Using that I produced this model to represent Oswald:

I'm fairly happy with how the heraldry turned out, though the deer was a bit fiddly to do! I tried doing blued armour on him, but actually it just looks the same as usual!

I also painted this other chap - Decided to go for a colourful look with the helmet and lance

So that's seven down now! Could be a little while until the next update though (they were hardly speedy anyway haha) as I've been lucky enough to pick up a couple of painting contracts with a couple of companies, so I'll most likely be doing them instead of my own. I may well set up a seperate blog for these (if I'm allowed) to show what I've been painting.

Some Men at Arms (at last)

Painting progress has been pretty slow over the last month or so - largely down to the fact that I hate painting full plate harness and also horses! So the new Perry stuff is sort of my idea of a nightmare, even though it is stunning. I've managed to get four men at arms done so far (7 more to do : /).

As you can see I've used a couple of heads from the WOTR and Mercenaries box, as I'm not overly keen on a few of the heads you get in the box. I'm going for quite a colourful look on these, multicoloured lances and bright barding etc. I quite like the chap at the end with the red and blue lance and gothic armour, he reminds me a bit of this Albrecht Durer drawing:

I've also done Rene's standard bearer, his banner was relatively simple to put together; I drew it up on Word and copied the birds in from an image on the web then painted it. Quite happy with the result.

Here's the Duke himself with his standard bearer. I've also had a little play around with some of the spare arms etc that come in the box. The seperate hands mean you can make some simple but effective conversions.

I put this chap together to lead my Nachut (who are a very long way off at the moment). I envisage them to be a fairly standard marching pike unit, yet to reach the action. As a result using one of the spare MAA arms I made this pose; quite like it. He looks as though he's fairly relaxed, but also fairly arrogant and skilled with that sword and buckler.

Well back to the grindstone - I'll try and get these last men at arms sorted.