Rennaisance duel prize for Sir Sidney Roundwood

During the last Analogue Hobbies challenge I entered into a Rennaisance duel with Sydney Roundwood,as you can tell from the title of this post he won!
He has created a wonderful Low countries city ( Laarden) and populated it with virtual historical characters and real military units from the late 17th century.
As far as a prize, the terms were a 28mm command figure from the Rennaisance,so something to fit in with the Laarden , all my 17th century figures are for the English civil war,so 1640s,a bit early,then I remembered I had picked up a handful of War of the Spanish Succesesion figures from Foundry in maybe the late 1980s who have lain dormant for a mere 30 ish years!
Suitably aged and in the right size range,Foundry/Dixon but a little too modern, looking at period references it seemed that they were close but had hats not tricornes so I removed the tricornes,I ended up doing an officer and a drummer as I started with the drummer and felt I needed somebody more senior.
I painted the officer's wig as hair (my what curly hair you have!) Actually it's not far off my daughter's hair to be honest, and stuck on Cromwell's hat that I cut off when turning him into my fist shaking Christian fundamentalist Covenanter commander.
( You see,it is worth keeping everything Stew!)
The drummer got a plastic warlord hat and reversed colours.
I went back to one of my pre Osprey colour uniform reference from the 1960s, it's a lovely Danish book, so you get full coverage of Scandanavia and northern Europe which makes a nice change from the (understandable)Anglo/ American bias of most of the books I have.
So I looked up the relevant conflict and found a French officer who could match my figure and finished my drummer to suit.

So two figures! I am working on a unit of landsknechts,which are very nearly finished and trying to flag up my Italian wars forces.

All the best Iain

Terrain 4 Two half timbered buildings

Long time no post, summer holidays and stuff. Lots of prepping and priming has been going on, always best in the dry weather but little finished product as such,lots in progress and I have finally finished something!
Two more half timbered buildings with yards, more lowland type buildings from the book ( Discovering timber framed buildings  by Richard Harris) I referred to in the last half timbered building post,medieval England is divided into two areas ,highland and lowland,you get lowland buildings in highland areas but not the other way around.
The first has a Rendra fence,I added a diagonal strap to another piece of fencing to make the gate . It's a useful kit with various types of fencing.
The outbuilding is part of the venerable Airfix Roman Fort kit which I've had since time immemorial. I've jacked it up with a bit of foamboard and added some balsa doors.
The main building is foamboard,balsa and flooring underlay I use for thatch. I realised that I put chimney pots on the last building, which was a mistake as chimney pots come in with the victorians. So no chimney pots on these! The window pains are aluminium car repair mesh sprayed with black paint,mostly painted with emulsion paint and a bit of ink,sand and flock to be similar to my figure basing.

Its funny but the roof doesn't look that red in real life, the Venetian command are there to add a bit of scale,they still haven't been put away yet!

The next one has close boarding (which indicates higher status) but no outbuilding and a wattle fence,I guess they blew the money on the building and had to make do!

The building materials are pretty much identical to the first.

I like the top shot so I have included one of the other building. Lots primed, painting tray has landsknecht pike fighting with Napoleonic French dragoons for my attention,my nephew's came up for a game of Chosen men, Napoleonic skirmish, and asI only had infantry for my French we proxied in Ben's Russians as French,soundly beaten by Des's British rifles supermen! So French cavalry are storming to the front of the question plus I need to finish assembling and prime my artillery too.

All the best 

Iain

Great Italian wars 22 To the strongest

We had a go at an Italian wars battle using the draft Italian wars additions that Simon Miller has for his To the strongest rules.
I grided up my board,6"squares are the recommended size for 28mm figures (nice mix of imperial and metric there, okay 150mm squares then!)on a 6'0" X 4'0" board.
Unfortunately my units were too big to fit in that size,for this game we made them 12"square but I figure on making my grid 8"square in future,we were just seeing how the game worked and have a bit of fun this time out!
We set up with on the French side two units of gendarmes, two deep units of Swiss pike, one unit of poor French pike,two artillery pieces and two generals.
On the Imperial side we had two deep landsknecht pike units , two artillery pieces,Spanish knights a colunna and two generals.
There was a river that could be crossed as rough terrain except at the bridges and some woods dotted around,there was also a camp for both sides.
With the boxes being so big we were into the action immediately with Des's landsknecht block going over the bridge and into a tussle with a Swiss block,where they remained for most of the game tying up two swiss and on French pike block for most of the game,I like the activation process, you need to turn a 2 or better to go,simple but to continue using the unit you need to beat your previous card, it means you almost always get at least one go but if you're card is high you won't get many gos, it's a nice elegant system.
The French artillery shot at the colunna,which as an extra deep unit that can't be flanked with added close combat ability and a shot  seems a touch too strong to my mind but probably need a few games to find out. The French gendarmes on the left got across the bridge. The Imperial artillery took out a unit of gendarmes the French artillery took out the Spanish knights,I like the limited ammunition and the fact that the artillery can work but is temperamental and has limited ammunition. The second gendarme unit took out both artillery pieces and then the landsknecht pike block on the other side the colunna which had been trading shots with the French artillery eventually decided to cross the river wheel and assault the artillery piece,at the last possible moment the artillery came good and took out the Spanish.with only the last landsknecht pike block still holding up three other units we called it a day,it was a great fun game that I felt gave a pretty good period feel.

We didn't go in for heroes and I'm sure we got plenty wrong as it was our first go, leading the gendarmes was my prize for winning the rennaisance challenge with Curt in AHC 7 ,I'm prepping a prize for Sidney Roundwood who won the last one, more scenery coming along ( not really up to scratch in this report but getting there, the river banks and roads have at last been flocked!) Im mostly prepping figures at the moment but one thing I realised after looking at this report is that I needed more flags, order sent to Pete's flags, great service just arrived I'll be showing units off with their new flags soon!

All the best Iain

Terrain 3 two bridges and a ruined chapel

More terrain and to start with another relatively elderly piece (probably 8years old), a ruined chapel. Mostly consisting of some GW gothic ruins (sans skulls!)with some plasticard slab sheet, balsa and bits and bobs including FS12 from the 1979 citadel fantasy specials,well half of it anyway.
We then have two plastic bridges,a rendra timber bridge and an Italeri/warlord stone bridge which I bought at Salute this year and have already painted!( frankly something of a record for me ,I bought the other bridge the year before which is more like it!)

Useful stuff and the bridges have already seen action, next up? More terrain,I need to try and drag it up to something like the standard of the figures as opposed to being poor second best!

All the best Iain

Terrain 2 A timber framed building

I have finally finished a timber framed building I've been working on for,oh about 10 years, probably been using it half finished for seven or eight years! It's scratch built from foamboard ,balsa and the roof is flooring underlay that I had spare.
The barn is based on a laser cut building I picked up in a pound shop and then clad with balsa. The windows are salvaged from the airfix control tower and the sets in the yard are red lentils!
It's a lowland English type of timber framing, good from the 15th century on , chimneys come in from the 15th century on although looking at mine I might add something to the top of them, I'm finishing off two more timber framed buildings so I could just tweak the chimney on this one.

I've shown some WOTR figures and livestock for scale and am now pretty happy with it,apart from the chimney!

This is a fantastic book if you're interested in timber framed buildings,it's loaded with illustrations and lots of details, really good for a small paperback (sorry couldn't change the orientation of the image on my phone!) Quite a useful piece, from the late 15th century on and even though it's lowland English,I'm happy to use it all over Europe! Next up more terrain, buildings, bridges and trees not sure in what order.

All the best Iain

Great Italian wars 21 another artillery piece!

So here we have a non landsknecht artillery piece for the Italian wars, the crew are foundry from their conquistador range. The piece itself is a mix of a barrel from a Spanish ship model range(who's twin was used last year in the Marigano Curtgeld vignette) some wheels from a GW snotling pump wagon I'd acquired and the carriage come from a reinforcement box for an MG ?game, the plastic figures of which were designed by GW: a mounted general, three mounted knights ,ten longbow men, five crossbow men,five halberdiers and an artillery piece with two crew in chunky 25mm in GW empire dress.
Even though I wasn't really doing much apart from 40k at the time I picked them up,at £2 a box I bought both boxes,20 years later I'm finally using something from one of the boxes!
I'm planning on using the rest of the boxes at some point to add to my Italian wars forces.

Next post will probably be some terrain as I'm trying to finish stuff off and generally improve the look of all the scenic elements.

All the best Iain