Mounted Normans

Normans freshly painted and ready for games of Saga, Midgard or Pillage.  

These are Conquest Miniatures plastics. Nice models, easy to assemble and convert, with a wide variety of heads, weapons etc.

Spear armed cavalry

There are a rather inconvenient 15 models in a box, so I've assembled 13 altogether to make two groups of six and one warlord. This will work well for units in both Saga and Midgard.

Spears are made from 1mm brass rod, which replace the plastic cast spears and are attached by drilling a hole in the rider's hand. Shield designs are essentially my inventions around a theme and are painted freehand.

You might have noticed that the shields on these models have a central boss. These are not the shields provided in the Mounted Norman box but are spares taken from a box of Conquest's Norman Foot soldiers. I did this mainly because I like the kite shields with raised rims around the edge but there aren't enough of these in the Mounted Norman box for all the models. Because none of the shields provided in that box have bosses, though, I did wonder whether Norman mouted might have had bosses on their sheilds. A quick check of (amongst other sources) the Bayeux Tapestry confirms that yes mounted did have shield bosses and also that the shield size is not consistent either, so the small variability of shield size of foot and mounted models is fine, not that anyone would notice.

Confirmation of bosses on cavalry kite shields 

The sword-armed cavalry were a little easier to assemble, although the sword hilts modelled onto the riders needed removal. Sword hilts were cut off carefully with a modelling knife and I tried to restore the chainmail detail with the knife point afterwards. this turned out not to be at all easy, so in the end I painted small dots to mimic the chainmail in these small areas on the figures. This is fine as long as you don't examine the figure too closely!

Sword-wielding mounted warriors

Horse colours draw from advice in Ian Heath's Armies of Feudal Europe (link to free pdf here). It might be from 1989 but it's still an excellent reference. Basically, any and all horse colours are fine. 

I've been a fan of Wargames Foundry paints for some years and am also a great admirer of the painting skills of Kevin Dallimore (whose talant far exceeds my own!) Kevin wrote a painting guide book and I use the horse painting guide from this for all my horse painting. This is partly due to being colourblind, and the guide is great to get the colours correct and realistic - and in my case to avoid blue and green horses. I've actually taken this to a truly anal level by putting this information along with details of the relative proportions of different coloured horses into an Excel spreadsheet, which will output individual painting guides for each horse which I can follow. More detail on that in a future blog post, so if you're reading this and want more details please let me know.

Some people leave basing until the last stage of preparing models but I find that this is easier and gives a better finish if done right at the start. After assembling the model and attaching to its base, I apply the base texture, spray prime the model, and then paint the base. This rarely needs more than the tiniest touch-up and addition of tufts and the model is done.

Warlord

Their commander, in common with my Saga Warlords is on a 40mm round base to set him apart from the others. Even though not specified for games like Pillage, this ensures that he is distinct from the rank and file.

I'm particularly pleased with the way the dapple grey turned out. This is not a horse colour I would typically choose to do but every now and again I do fancy a challenge.

Overall, they've come out better than I had expected and I'm looking forward to getting them on the table soon.