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| Reinforcements for my Mutatawwi'a army |
I also realised that
I had made a very basic error in my original list concept - Mutatawwi'a aren't
permitted mounted Warriors (oops!).
So the additional
troops I have put together for the list are as follows:
- 4 x more horse-mounted Hearthguard (to add to the four mounted from before, which we can now consider to be Hearthguard rather than Warriors);
- 24 x bow-armed Warriors (giving the option for pretty much any of my Warriors to be fielded as bow-armed);
- 1 x additional standard-bearing Warrior (giving an option to field two large bow-armed Warrior units with War Banners - which I thought might be worth a try in some circumstances); and
- 8 x camel-mounted Hearthguard (because, I am told, you just have to have them, don't you?)
Mounted Hearthguard (on horses)
I could have bought
some more Crusader Miniatures Berber Cavalry for these, to match the other
figures I already had, but having had a search around on the web I liked the
look of the Saracen cavalry castings by Black Tree Design, so ordered a pack of
three of them. I already had one Crusader Miniatures model left over from
before so the idea was to make an additional 4 mounted Hearthguard from these.
The Black Tree
Design models took 25 days to arrive after ordering but I was expecting this
based on other people's experience and wasn't in any hurry. That said, there
were extenuating circumstances and I received an unexpected apology from them
as well. Not necessary, chaps! And in any case, they were well worth the wait.
Lovely castings and on first look at them I know I will be buying more from
this company in future. That said, there were a few strong mould lines and a
fair amount of flash on the horses, some of which was quite heavy and took more
work than usual to make good. Riders were fine though, nice castings and easy
to clean up.
I drilled a hole in the rider's left arm to take the remaining stump of the drawing pin and attached with glue. Figures were then assembled and attached to bases. Using some green stuff I filled gaps between riders and horses, added veils across their faces (to match the rest of the army) and cloaks, so as to differentiate these four Hearthguard from the other four should I field them as separate units. Finally, I made short spears from 1mm brass rod and attached these to the figures.
I removed the flash and cleaned up mould lines on the figures. I filed off the fittings for the shields on the left arms of the riders, as I intended to replace the shields provided with slightly smaller ones. My intent was to use some of the shields from Crusader Miniatures Saracens, as these are lovely, but Crusader don't supply separate shields. So I scratch-built some using 12mm washers, drawing pins and some green stuff. Not as nice as the Crusader ones, but almost exactly the same size and reasonably straightforward to make. I clipped off the pin from the drawing pin, leaving a short bit attached so that I could fix it to the figure. I glued the washer to this so that the shield was slightly enlarged and provided with a rim. When this was dry I made shield bosses from a couple of small blobs of green stuff.
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| The process of adding scratch-built shields |
I also made four extra shields and attached these to the four mounted Hearthguard I had previously painted.
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| Mounted Hearthguard, cleaned up (some with textured bases!) |
I bought a second
box of Gripping Beast plastic Arabs for these, adding arms with bows and
quivers, plenty of which were left over from the first pack, to make up the
numbers.
Figures were
assembled in a variety of poses and based on 25mm repair washers. Using green
stuff I added veils across faces and some cloaks.
War Banner
This chap was made
in very similar manner to the previous banner man out of one of the Gripping
Beast plastic Arabs. His banner is a square cut from a small piece of cotton,
fixed in position with superglue.
The slogan I painted
on the banner is the same phrase as used previously - Allah is great.
Camel-mounted Hearthguard
After scouring the
Internet for quite a long time I decided to use the camels from Black Tree
Design (and this was the main reason for purchasing anything from them). I much
prefer the shaggy, slightly cartoony look they have over the relatively clean
lines of the Gripping Beast models (sorry, Andy & Darren, just my personal
preference). I was a bit concerned about all the camels being in the same pose
though - on some of the pictures on the Internet they look very regimented -
but I reasoned that I could almost certainly move some legs around and vary the
overall impression if I put my mind to it, so I took the plunge and ordered
three packs, one of each of the spear-armed camel-mounted Saracens they
produce, so as to get even more variety.
I was not
disappointed. In fact, there are three camel poses, and the figures are
absolutely gorgeous. As with the Black Tree Design horses, there was a lot of
heavy flash to be cleaned off - so much
in fact that I had to use a drill - but after a morning's work they cleaned up
very nicely and I think they look great.
Two of the figures
were cast with weapons held against their sides. I much prefer open hands to
equip with spears for all these figures so carefully removed the arms concerned
and replaced them with spare arms from the Gripping Beast plastic Arabs, removing
plastic spears and drilling holes to take wire ones later. Replacement arms
were pinned in place strongly by reinforcing the joint with wire.
I added
scratch-built shields, cloaks and (longer) brass rod spears in the same way as
for the cavalry, and made good the gaps between riders and camels with green
stuff once the assembled figures were dry.
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| Cleaned up camels |
All the figures were
based with a mix of PVA glue, Polyfilla, water and builders sand, spread over
the bases and textured with a sprinkling of small stones and chinchilla dust.
Before this dried I washed any overspill of this mix from the feet of the figures
concerned.
As usual I primed
the figures with an off-white emulsion and painted bases Crown Brown Sugar
highlighted with a dry brush of Crown Biscuit.
Figures were painted
in exactly the same way as described in my earlier post The 20-Day Challenge, but with the following additions:
Camels
Generally sandy
brown coloured, but they can be quite light, with almost white patches. I
undercoated some camels in Desert Yellow and some in Brown Sand, and added
various levels of lighter highlighting to get a variety of appearances within
the same overall colour tone.
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| Half-painted camels |
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| Mostly-painted camel |
I chose two shield
designs, one for the cavalry and one for the camels. These used brown, black
and brass in the same colour scheme and general style as the shields for the
foot warriors described in the previous post.
The photo sequences
below show the progress of each of these shield designs.
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| Shield design for horse-mounted Hearthguard |
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| Painting sequence for camel-mounted Hearthguard shields |
Overall I think they
look really nice and they will definitely be a handy addition to my Mutatawwi'a
army.
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| Horse-mounted Hearthguard |
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| Camel-mounted Hearthguard |
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| Bow armed Warrior unit #1 |
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| Bow armed Warrior unit #2 |
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| War banner bearer |
