Bloody Miniatures: First Wave Painted

 As my busy work season presses on I continue to pick away at painting figures in what spare time I have, working my way through the Bloody Miniatures catalogue (as there are only 48 figures in the range so far it shouldn't take long...right?). I have completed the first wave of releases from BM; after a brief side track into 15mm ancients, I hope to get started on wave 2 shortly.

As part of the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge I painted BM 001, The Mortuary Men. Here I have BM002, The Forlorn Hope:

BM003 is The Pistoleers:

BM004 is- my favourite of the first wave- The Dismounted Troopers:

As with the first couple of packs I painted these were a delight, though I still seem to struggle with the faces for some reason; I can't seem to be able paint them to the level they deserve. I love the way the clothing is sculpted and the details are perfect. I look forward to the next batch as there are some fantastic looking figures in it.

ECW Cuirassier

 I picked up some painted Perry Cuirassier off of ebay last month. 

Although not in bad shape, they were sloppily painted. I chose not to strip them but just tidied up the paint job and gave them a standard.

I opted to give them a Prince Rupert's Lifeguard of Horse standard from Wargames Designs. Was Rupert's lifeguard cuirassier? Probably not, but it gives them some distinction on the games table.

Although there are 8 troopers on 4 bases in Pike And Shotte I would only use 3 bases and they would count as Small.

And The Weeks Turned Into Months...

 This past winter, since December 20th I have concentrated on the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge (for those unfamiliar with it, see here) and the bulk of that time was spent painting my rather excessive collection of GW's LoTR plastic kits (not really historical material...).  However, to give myself a bit of a break from my main drive I did complete a few ECW figures, mainly from the Bloody Miniatures range.

The first group are from blister BM001, The Mortuary Men:

As has been said elsewhere these are wonderful character models.

I did a second blister, BM009 The Moss Troopers from the second wave released last year:

From the BM webstore:

    "A rapacious gang of brigands, freebooters, broken men, or discharged and destitute soldiers turned to banditry and ambuscades."

Perfect for skirmish games; really suitable for low figure count games such as Fistful of Lead or an adaptation of the incredibly flexible Pulp Alley rules.

My final entry of the campaign was a command stand for King Charles I.

I broke what some seem to consider a cardinal rule of building wargaming units and used figures from different manufacturers here (5 in fact!). The sergeant with the halberd is from Avanpost, the Cuirassier with the standard is from Horcata, King Charles is from Warlord Games, the dismounted Cavalry officer from Bicorne Miniatures and the horses by Front Rank.

The Horcata figure comes with a saddle sculpted to the rider as they were designed for the Front Rank horses but I had to sculpt a saddle for King Charles:

Aside from Charles' large head (seems historically appropriate...) all the figures fit together well enough . The King's standard is from Wargames Designs.

I chose to paint Charles' horse as a dun like Van Dyck's 1637/38 portrait of him as opposed to a grey as in the 1633 portrait in part because the grey is an almost exact replica of other mounts in Van Dyck's other portraits of European nobility so was probably his default portrait steed.

Customised Warbases Church

 It seems a necessary piece of table top dressing for any ECW campaign is a little old English church. For some time now I had the intention of building or buying one; in the end I settled for a  MDF kit from Warbases, although I have added quite a bit to it. 

I essentially used the MDF kit as a starting point, a frame onto which I added 3 main  extras:

• Slaters Plastikard 7mm dressed Stone for the walls
• custom made and cast slate roof 
•  quoins and window trim sculpted from grey stuff

Here we have it before the customisation:

And after:

I didn't use the windows that came with the kit but instead I glued drywall mesh to the inside of the building and painted it black.

For the front of the entrance I glued sheet styrene, textured with a craft knife to represent wood, to the MDF. The walkway is foam pavers.

The tree is a plastic Woodland Scenics armature with my standard foliage recipe. The most time consuming part of the build was making the roof. I wanted something that was a bit more 3D than the paper offering and although the slates did come out a smidge fantasy I am quite happy with them. I made two moulds so I will be able to make them up quickly should I decide to make a similar roof later.

 I'm not 100% confident in my colour choice for the quoins; in the end I am satisfied but I think If I was going to do it over I think I would go with something a little more tan, a little less yellowy orange.

I cannot recall where I bought the statue; I originally bought it for my Mordheim project and had forgot about it- I just remembered it yesterday- but it is a beautiful little piece of work.

What's a church yard with out grave stones? These ones are simply made from XPS foam.

One of the reasons I chose the Warbases kit is that it has a small footprint on the table. I think if I was building it specifically for skirmish gaming I would have gone with a bigger kit, like Sarissa Precision's church.

Hopefully there won't be such a long break between posts through the next few months. Works slows down during winter and I have some ECW figures lined for the Analogue Hobby Painting Challenge which starts in about two and a half hours.

18mm Crimean War French

After what seems like a very long time I have completed the Eureka 18mm Crimean War French.

Eureka's French come in 3 different poses, in 2 types of head wear; shako:

And Kepi:

Conveniently the French uniforms have essentially the same colour as the Turks; this project did finish off my bottle of Army Painter red.

I would say that these figures were better sculpted than the Turks; I'm not sure if it is the same sculptor or a different one.

I found the faces and the hands to have better definition, easier to paint, . This officer chose to wear his optional 'steel grey' trousers instead of red: 

The French also have a very nice little cannon to accompany them:

I see that Eureka has an Army Commander pack for the French so I may order one of those and pick up another gun while I am at it.

The Battle of Freezing Hill

 The last Sunday of July saw Murdock and I resume our ECW campaign with The Battle of Freezing Hill, a prelude to the main event, Lansdowne Hill.

After scouting out Lansdowne Hill the previous day, Lord Hopton's Royalist force returned the following morning to occupy it only to discover that William Waller's army had ensconced itself at the crest of it in the meantime. 

After deploying for battle and seeing the Waller had no intention of leaving Lansdowne Hill, Hopton retired towards Marshfield. Waller sent out a harassing force and Hopton was obliged to present some of his army as a rearguard; this battle is the result.

  The Royalist rearguard; Hopton's dragoons in the forefront with Howard's and Vaughan's in the middle; commanded shot in the middle distance with more of Howard's and Vaughan's horse on their flank and more commanded shot in the far distance:

The Parliamentarian pursuit force made up largely of  small divisions of horse from Col. Robert Burghill's regiment of horse, the Gloucestershire Horse and Waller's horse...

.... with Waller's Dragoons and the Somerset Dragoons sneaking up the flanks in amongst the hedges:

Col. Thomas Howard's horse await the enemy:

Royalist commanded shot from Nicolas Slanning's regiment anchor the right flank... 

...trading musket fire with Waller's and the Somerset Dragoons:

Parliamentarian reinforcements show up early (equal to or less than the turn number on 2D6- snake eyes on turn 2!) pushing forward and the Royalist's (Howard's horse) respond with getting the first charge in:

Surely a Standard sized unit of gallopers with a commander attached and rear support, charging a Small unit of trotters would win, right? Sigh.... the photo below show the defeated Howard's horse as it breaks for the table edge:

In the turn following, the Parliamentarian dragoons win their musket duel with Hopton's dragoons... 

...  and send them on their way:

Eventually, the Royalist reinforcements arrive, in the form of Col. Trevannion's regiment of foot:

Not a moment too soon either as the Parliamentarian commander makes good use of his early reinforcements to start hemming the Royalist rearguard in:

With the arrival of the foot, Bennet's brigade of horse immediately follow,  making the battlefield a little less forlorn for the Royalists:

In the middle distance, the Royalist horse reinforcements move to fill the hole left by the defeated Howards horse:

Carnarvon's horse, with support, look to chase Waller's dragoons from the hedges on their flank but come up short in the charge:

Thus, they are exposed to a charge in the flank; they are unable to turn to face but their support is:

Although not a complete disaster, the veteran Carnarvon's horse are forced back.

Near the end of the game, this picture shows the Parliamentarian horse largely intact; the hole in the lower right recently vacated by Godolphin's commanded shot, breaking the Royalist foot battalia:

The final act of desperation by the Royalists, with the hope of inflicting some sort of damage on the Parliamentarian horse (who- on paper- were the inferior), is the charge of Howard's second unit of horse into their opponents. Nearly identical to the first charge of Royalist horse: a Standard unit of Gallopers, with flank and rear support charging a Small unit of trotters with only rear support. Sadly, an identical result as well as the snake eyes of the Break Test show:

With that, 3 of the 4 Royalist battalia were broken and officers started ordering regiments off the field. The best performing regiment for the Royalists was Slanning's regiment of foot, shown below before being ordered to retreat:

This game featured some wild die rolling from both parties right from turn 2 onwards. Oddly enough very few 3 move orders were rolled for on either side; the crazy die rolling seem to reserve itself for saves and break tests. In the past I have been a rather rash commander, a little reckless with my troops, however this time I was more conservative; sadly, my new approach did not change the Royalist's fortunes. Despite having the advantage of numbers and quality of horse I was unable to rack up a W. This leaves the Royalists 0-5 in our campaign series. 

You will have noticed some different paint jobs on some of the Royalist horse; I had to pilfer some from Jeff's collection as I seemed to have misplaced about a dozen of my own. As before, we used Warlord Game's Pike and Shotte rules with amendments from To Kill A King. Something to note is that we have not been using Blunders; we started the campaign without them and decided to carry on as is. Next up is Lansdowne Hill, which should be interesting...

Edit: The Parliamentarian version of the battle is available here.