Category Archives: Whats on the work bench?

As we approach the end of October, I thought that another work bench round up was in order. My on going painting projects are still, to some extent, curtailed by the work that is continuing to convert my garage into a proper wargaming den. The good news is that all the building work on the room is now completed, with one exception….We haven’t been able to get the floor done! The date for this work is 16th November and until the floor is laid, I really cant move anything back in. So patience is the key word. I have been over to Ikea to check out desks and storage and I’ve been out chalking up possible arrangements on the concrete floor for the cabinets and gaming table. However, until the floor is laid, the project is really on hold.

Meanwhile, I have been pursuing my hobby as best that I can, given my restricted circumstances. On 10th October, I attended the Partizan show over at Newark. As it is just down the road from me, it wasn’t too much of a hardship to get there! Unusually, I didn’t take any photos of the actual show, even though there were some superb demonstration games on show. I was too busy talking to people that I hadn’t seen for so long thanks to the issues with Covid. I did purchase some more Perry Miniatures whilst I was there and for once they have gone straight onto the painting table rather than into the lead pile. I treated myself to some Irish Kern and an Irish Command set. I don’t intend to build a full Irish army but I thought that another unit of Kern would be useful and I intend to have a couple of units of Gallowglass so that I can add some Irish mercenaries to my WOTR army.

I painted the first batch of Kern in exactly the same way that I painted the Crusader miniature versions in my collection. You can see how by clicking here:

KERN SKIRMISHERS

When it came to painting the command group, I primed the two Armoured figures in Black and the rest in Desert yellow rather than the flesh undercoat that I had been using for Kern. As you can see, the two armoured figures are ready for basing. With hind sight, the Dark red cloak was a bad idea. I should have gone for a Dark blue or Green cloak as the red effect is slightly reminiscent of Father Christmas!

The remaining Kern are also nearly finished – the two pipers are about ready for basing. I was tempted to go for a tartan finish to the bag on the bag pipes but my references show them as being a plain leather bag. In this case, I went for the easy option rather than let my ‘artistic interpretation’ run loose! The two other Kern are also near to completion. One will make a good standard bearer, so I will have to add a flag. The other is sword armed and perhaps represents a ‘Bonnacht’ – a more professional and experienced Kern, perhaps a bodyguard for the Standard bearer.

So another 12 figures are nearing completion and my WOTR army continues to expand, despite me thinking it finished a year or so ago! I did buy one other item at Partizan. A medieval Ox cart. I think that I might take my time on this project and perhaps provide a step by step guide to making and painting it.

THE COMMERCIAL BIT

I hope that you all enjoy your hobby as much as I do – remember that our web site will have much of what you need! Click here to see our shop:

ARCANE SCENERY

Happy Modelling!

This blog is a bit of a catch up on some of the side projects that I have been working on. First up, I inherited some old foundry WOTR figures from a very good friend. They were unbased, a bit chipped and some of their spears had broken off. That said, they were beautifully painted, complete with hand painted standards. I thought that they deserved a bit of TLC so that they could return to the table top once again!

The Foundry figures were sculpted by the Perry’s so they are obviously very similar to my existing Perry Plastic army but a bit on the short side. I remedied this by re basing them on thicker MDF bases and used the basing texture paste to give them a bit more height. I then touched up any obvious paint chips, re painted the helmets to give them a bit of shine and re attached the spears. Once they were in their new movement tray they looked fine next to the newer Perry Plastics – as you can see from the photograph.

Whilst I was working on this unit I also thought that I would add some extra flags to my units. Pete Harris had kindly given me a sheet of Freezy Water Yorkist flags. Rather then leaving them languishing in a folder unused, I cut them out and attached them to 100mm spears that we sell at Arcane Scenery. I had to cut the spears down as they were a bit long. Be careful if you do this. I was using my Xuron cutters, that will go through the steel pins with ease BUT the off-cuts fly all over the place, so make sure that you protect your eyes! Once the flags were mounted, I painted the edges of the flags to cover any white that shouldn’t be showing with approximately the matching colours and then drilled the back of my movement trays to add the flags.

Now purists should sit down now. I didn’t worry at all about what flag should go with what unit or even who the flags should represent. So long as the colours were close to the livery of the figures, I added them to the tray. Should I decide to re fight a specific battle of the WOTR in the future, it is a simple matter to remove the flags and find the correct ones, but for now my units look prettier on the table!

Whilst I was in the mood to finish things off and get figures off of the lead pile, I decided to complete the three last figures that I had left over from a Perry’s Plastic WOTR command frame. I decided to give them heads from the mounted men at arms. I was influenced by Pete Harris ( the other one… yes, there are two Pete Harris’s that I game with and I thought that everyone in wargaming was called Dave) and my memories of the Crescent knights that I had as a child..

The final figure that I painted was a limited edition Cry Havoc’ Games Workshop figure that I had acquired years ago. I realised that he was based on a Landsknecht and thought that he would make a good ‘Martin Schwartz’ should I ever get around to adding a German contingent to my army! He is a bit on the tall side but will make an imposing command figure. So despite ‘finishing’ my WOTR army, I keep finding excuses to add to it. It has now grown to well over 300 figures and there’s more to paint!

THE COMMERCIAL BIT

I hope that you all enjoy your hobby as much as I do – remember that our web site will have much of what you need! Click here to see our shop:

ARCANE SCENERY

We also have a category devoted to Never Mind the Bill Hooks:

NEVER MIND THE BILL HOOKS!

Please have a look at our tools section to find the Xuron clippers

EXPO TOOLS

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The War of the Roses rules set ‘Never Mind the Bill Hooks’ allows you to take Irish Kern as a skirmisher option. They were included as a nod towards their involvement at a couple of battles, notably the battle of Stokes Field 1497, considered to be the last battle in the War of the Roses. The inclusion of Kern was less of a historical requirement and more of an opportunity to add a bit of colour to players troops choices, as well as giving players a slightly different tactical problem to use/deal with.

On the face of it, a band of 6 Kern skirmishers are hardly likely to change the course of a game. But they can add to the fun and cause a great deal of mischief. Even if you don’t include them in your main list, it’s worth having a band in reserve, just in case the special event card is drawn that lets you deploy an extra band of Skirmishers anywhere on the table hidden in terrain.

Kern are pretty fragile. They only save on a 6 against shooting and they can only shoot ( throw Javelins or darts) a maximum of 6 inches themselves, so why take them? Well, where they come in handy is that they can move into hand to hand combat against other skirmishers. As they have the same movement as skirmishers, it’s unlikely that your opponent will be able to evade, so you will catch his skirmishers and then you will be fighting, rolling one dice for each kern against his 1/2 dice per skirmishers. So they are great at mopping up opposition skirmishers. They are also able to hide in cover, moving 16 inches regardless of the terrain, to attack any exposed flank or rear of a carelessly positioned unit. It’s unlikely that they will beat your average Billmen unit or for that matter, Men at Arms but they will upset your opponents plans and help to disrupt their battle line.

There is another risk to using these fierce warriors. Kern will pursue a beaten enemy, even if that means they go off table. They also ‘bounce’ off a unit if they dont daunt or rout the unit that they are attacking. This can be a mixed blessing as they will not stay locked in combat and can run away from a superior unit having caused their mischief. All in all well worth having a band just for the fun of it!

I used a pack of Crusader miniatures for my Kern. There are 8 in a pack, so although that is two more than needed, the other two figures will come in useful as additional levy or as part of a larger Irish contingient.

My research seemed to show that Irish Kern often dressed in yellow tunics. Painting yellow can be fraught with difficulties as it is not heavily pigmented as doesn’t cover well. Whilst chatting to a colleague about this problem, he told me that the best colour to paint over was pink. I decided to prime the figures in flesh and to test the theory. Priming the figures with Army Painter Flat Flesh would also save a bit of time as the figures are bare legged.

I then painted the tunics with Yellow ochre. It’s a good yellow to use as it’s not too bright. I didn’t want my Kern to look as though they were wearing High Viz jackets! I then picked out the other featuresl – hair, belts, tunics in a variety of colours – see the picture for detail. The tunics were washed with soft tone and when dry, highlighted with yellow ochre again and then pale sand as the top highlight. The flesh was highlighted with flat flesh and then basic skin tone.

I used dark tone to wash the leather and other areas, then highlighted with the original colour and then added Iraqi sand to get the top highlights. Bows and weapons were painted with Vallejo old wood.

I did some research for the shield designs but decided that they wouldn’t have anything too sophisticated, so I hand painted the basic designs shown. I did consider painting a portrait of Phil Lynott on one of the shields, just so that I could sing ‘The Boys are back in Town’ when ever they charged out of cover into attack but decided my painting skills weren’t up to the job!

I also made a minor conversion to one of the Kern. I thought that one figure with his foot on an opponents head was enough, so I removed the head on the second figure with a pair of clippers and added in an appropriately sized rock!

So another unit is added to my army. Am I finished now….? Well not quite. The next project will be to paint a couple of ‘rabble’ or levy units. I’m in no rush though, there’s plenty in the painting queue!

Almost all of the paints, miniatures, bases, basing materials and anything that you are likely to need for your hobby are available from my shop here:

ARCANE SCENERY

You can see the range of Crusader miniatures that we think are suitable to for the Wars of the roses, along with the rest of out Never mind The Bill Hooks range here:

NEVER MIND THE BILL HOOKS!

You can find all the Vallejo Model colour paints here. If you don’t want to browse, just enter the paint number into the shop search bar;

VALLEJO PAINTS

Happy Modelling!

Wargames Illustrated issue 383, September 2019, came with a free sprue of Landsknechts. At the time, I had a quick look at the figures, decided that it was unlikely that I would ever paint them and they were tossed onto my ‘leadpile’. Fast forward to April 2021 and I was looking for my next batch of figures to paint and I ‘rediscovered’ them. As you will know, I am currently working on my War of the Roses army and although these these troops were not really around at the time, I thought I might get away with using them!.

The nearest that I could get to Landsknechts appearing in England were the German and Swiss mercenary force under the command of Martin Schwartz, who fought at the battle of Stokes Field in 1487. According the the Wikipedia article, the German mercenaries were equipped with the latest handguns. By chance, my sprue of six Landsknechts were missile troops with the option of either hand guns or cross bows. That was good enough for me, I would complete the troops as a group Handgunner skirmishers and they could make a colourful, albeit, unlikely addition to my War Of The Roses collection and ‘Never Mind The Bill Hooks’ Army.

I cleaned the figures up, assembled and primed them and then thought about how I would go about painting them. I am definitely getting lazy in my old age, when it comes to research. In the past I would have looked at countless references and articles to get an idea as to how to paint these troops. As it was, I used an earlier guide to painting Landsknechts in War Games Illustrated 129, written by Michael Perry. I also checked out a you tube video by Pete the wargamer and of course, used the painted figures on the Warlord site as my references.

Initially, I started with one of the simpler figures to paint and went for a straight forward red black and white scheme. Based on this test figure, I decided that a batch paint job was never going to work. Although I intended to keep things simple, even where the figures shared the same colour – on the guns, shoes, belts, sword scabards etc, the complexity of the colours on the rest of the figure made it difficult to paint these areas as a batch. So apart from the flesh, each figure was painted separately.

As I painted each figure, I became a little more adventurous with the colours. As always, yellow is a very difficult colour to paint as it just doesn’t cover well. I had the same problem with orange. In fairness, I think that my priming coat of grey was not such a good idea. White would have worked better. Still it was good fun in choosing the colour combinations. I particularly liked the purple and orange. I can’t remember the last time that I used either of these colours on wargames figures!

I was able to base the group as a batch and followed my usual basing procedure using Vallejo Dark Earth textured paste to blend the figures onto the base, added some ballast and then painted and highlighted with brown emulsion and Iraqi sand. I finished the basing with some woodland scenics coarse scatter and some gamers grass tufts. I couldn’t resist adding a few flowers to the bases – as if the figures weren’t bright enough!

I have no doubt that when these figures appear on the table that my gaming buddies will take great delight in targeting them and they will no doubt finish the game looking like the German mercenaries at Stokes Field. To quote Jean Molinet, historian to the Burgundian court, writing c1490

“…when it came to the joining in battle (they) could not withstand the shooting of the English archers, especially the Germans, who were only half-armed; and although they displayed great bravery, as much, indeed, as their small number and substance allowed, they were routed and defeated, shot through and full of arrows like hedgehogs.”

I dont think that I will be painting any more Landsknechts but that might change when Bill Hooks volume two is released. Both the Swiss and Burgundian armies will be covered, along with the Italian wars at the time, so I may yet be tempted!

THE COMMERCIAL BIT

Almost all of the paints, miniatures, bases, basing materials and anything that you are likely to need for your hobby are available from my shop here:

ARCANE SCENERY

Perry’s WOTR plastic range are here, including some nice army deals!

PERRY MINIATURES

You can see the range of Renedra Accessories here:

Renadra Scenic Accessories

You can find all the Vallejo Model colour paints here. If you don’t want to browse, just enter the paint number into the shop search bar;

VALLEJO PAINTS

Happy Modelling!