Terrain 5 Christmas trees!

It's been a while, I' ve been busy doing hobby stuff,I just haven't finished anything! Last Christmas in the new kitchen we thought we'd have a little Christmas tree in there in addition to the one in the living room,so we picked up one second hand from a charity shop for about a fiver.
This year it was deemed surplus to requirements ,however I retrieved it before it made it to the bin,out with the aviation snips and the hole cutter and I then have 21 trees,they're by no means the best model trees but en mass they do a job and I still have another 50 left!

Here they are with some of my Soviets,I'll probably do a load more for winter as there isn't much to them,once I have the base(with a hole in the middle from the hole cutter) I stick some masking tape on the underside and then uhu the tree in with the base vertical,then when that's gone off I trim the tree at the bottom (so it doesn't look like the branches go all the way to the ground) and a bit of a haircut at the top to give it shape,PVA sand/gravel emulsion paint and a bit of cheap flock I had lying around and then snow to taste,I might base some with my Italian wars finish and call them cypress. For the price and effort I'm well happy,I also plan on doing some more on CDs a la Stew, I'll stuff the trees into some offcuts of foam board and then glue that to the CDs. I'm also working on some more conventional model trees and prepping for the Analogue Hobbies challenge which starts on the 21st.

All the best Iain

Great Italian wars 27 landsknechts flagtastick!(TM)

I've finally managed to get some flags onto my blocks of landsknecht pikemen. You will notice the chaps from the last post and the levelled pikemen from a couple of posts back together with all my other landsknecht pikemen.
Once again the flags are free downloads from Warflag and krigsspil with the edges touched up.
There are Artizan,Foundry ,Old Glory, Warlord and some unknown eBay chunky types.
I've based the units on this illustration from Funkens Age of Chivalry volume three.

That was the image that I had in mind when I started these pike blocks,Im pretty happy with how they have turned out,I'm working on a similar type of pike block with levelled,angled and vertical pikes for a Swiss force, Perry plastics and others, great fun!
Mostly cleaning up genitors and stradiots when I'm not working on pikemen,no one near getting painted for a while but I do have further flagtastick outings planned!
All the best Iain

Great Italian wars 26 rebased landsknechts plus a few more

Rebasing,yes it had to happen,here we have the unit that started this blog off, almost two years ago, plus twelve more that I've painted up to bring the basing more in line with all my other pikemen,a total of thirty six  figures mostly Artizan(with a few odd unknown chunky types off eBay)

The flags are free downloads from Warflag and krigsspil which have turned out rather well I think.
I've shown them as one unit of thirty six figures but in fact they will be split in two as backing units to two units with levelled pikes to give me two units of thirty six pikes.
The next post will be all my landsknechts now with added flags!
All the best Iain

Great Italian wars 25 French command stand

Here we have a command stand for the Italian wars, I'm saying it's French because I've been painting Fleur de lis on the horse armour and the standard bearer is carrying a French flag, but being Italian wars,I can swap out the flag for one similar but with a red diagonal stripe and I then have Charles Duke of Bourbon an Imperial commander from 1523 on.
These are both Foundry figures and still really nice even after all these years,in fact the flag is a free download from Foundry, so they're all of a one.
I started the mounted officer some years ago and have just finally finished him, the standard bearer I've done in relatively muted colours.

How nice to be able to photograph them outside at the end of October!
Next up I've painted twelve more landsknechts to add to the twenty four to be rebased, they're basing is ongoing,who knows maybe I'll squeeze another post into a surprisingly busy October!
After that it's landsknecht flagtastick! (TM A Morrison)
Followed by something Napoleonic ,maybe, there's not really much on the painting table it's all finishing at much the same time.
All the best Iain

Great Italian wars 24 more landsknechts

At Salute 2017 my nephew drew my attention to a couple of bags of second hand Artizan landsknechts at a great price, inevitably I bought them.
Unfortunately they were double handed swordsmen and I didn't really want blocks of doppelsoldiers.
So they hung around until at Colours 2017 I bought some Foundry landsknecht command and some more Pikemen with levelled pikes ,combined with some of the Artizan doppelsoldiers to give me enough for three bases of levelled pike with doppelsoldiers pushing forward to hack down the opposition pikes, encouraged by both the Foundry officers and some Warlord command figures I picked up in Rochester when I bought the Warlord plastic landsknechts (of which more anon,assembled and primed but others are ahead of them in the painting que). One of the Foundry officers was missing his right arm and I have replaced it with a spare plastic ECW warlord command arm, I think it works alright.

The casualty figures are Artizan too. The rest of the Artizan figures are being painted up to add to the first unit I posted on this blog,I'm going to (deep breath) rebase them,there I've said it! 

It's mainly because they just don't look dense enough four to a base so I'm going to squeeze more figures onto the bases to bring them up to the same size as all the rest of my pikemen. Also the basing didn't match all the rest of my Italian wars forces.

So maybe them next or possibly some Napoleonic cavalry.

All the best Iain

Great Italian wars 23 Spanish flagged

I said when I posted my Spanish coloneas  that I would post them again once flagged and this is that post,what I didn't expect was that it would take quite so long,as it was August 2017 when I blithely said I'd do that,possibly even soon!
After the first outing of my Italian wars with To the Strongest,I realised that lots of my infantry were lacking flags and as they add so much in this colourful period I decided to make amends,bite the bullet and get some flags!

Four coloneas and a command stand, most of the flags are from Petes flags and are splendid,one of them is a Foundry free download and the rest came from the warflag site, the last picture is of them back in their box ready to get stored again!
Next up is some newly painted landsknechts, probably followed by a load of landsknecht reflagging and (whisper it) some rebassing (oh the horror!)
All the best Iain.