Andalusian III/34 project begins 11 April 2023

So far as I can work out, this will be my final book 3 army. Of course I do have that full box of Norman foot, and any number of vaguely Slavic scrubs lying around.

Anyway, for Andalusians I splurged on not only El Cid series HaT Almoravids, but HaT Andalusians. I don't have much in the way of sourcebooks so this could end up quite wrong.

The kits are absolutely top quality, a pleasure to prep. My only quibble is that all horses are the same mixture, be they light or heavy. 

Because they were so clean, I got all the needed minis mounted on paint sticks, and base varnished, in one day. I've included enough options to cover Sicilian Muslims as well, though I'm sure the costumes are wrong. 

I decided to take the radical choice of an indigo wash. It might speed up costume painting!

bench update 09 April 2023

Normans (pretty much) complete!

Sadly, I have run out of the beige grass tufts I've been relying on. 

I have yet to put a couple of gonfalon on lances, too. But for now...

 

bench update 02 April 2023

Good progress on the Normans. The shields are going to be tricky, and I need some color here and there to relieve the brown and metal tones.

bench update 25 March 2023

Ten days later. Last weekend all I could manage to do was visualize how I was going to approach the Normans. Today, I followed through with a burnt Siena base. Then I did some more visualizing on whether some dry brush highlights would help or hinder. I decided "help" but may have been wrong. 

bench update 15 March 2023

Just adding a quick note on results for using superglue to fix riders to mounts.

Pretty good overall. One was not seated at all well, so I had to take it off and carve some more saddle away, but the other 11 are ok, if brittle. I went over them all with a 2nd round of glue.

I used a completely new tube, to get maximum thinness from the glue, which has to soak between the pieces.

I hope that once they are all layered over with varnish base coat the brittle nature of the join won't be a problem. 

bench update 11 March 2023

For the Norman project, I turned to OneNote again. Three pages: required, have, needed. This is a morph army, using extensive amounts of Spanish and Crusader elements. After working through the army list, and those three pages, I calculate that I actually did not need to buy those Strelets Norman foot! All this project needs is the dozen Norman knights minis, and five crossbowmen. 

Those crossbow minis come from another Strelets set, medieval crossbowmen, M025. The strength of this set is that the minis are from right along the timeline, and there's no trouble finding five vaguely 11th-century looking fellows. They are sculpted with very stubby bows, allowing the crossbows to be posed realistically.

The Norman knights, 085, have quite a lot of mould lines and minor flash to trim, so that's what I've done, to this point. The saddles make an extremely tight fit, so some extra trimming and boiling water are needed. I plan to squeeze some superglue into the crevices and skip pinning them. The look is tidy and handsome, for Strelets, but some lances are just awful. The mounts are much better sculpted than their riders, frankly, and are possibly the first I've seen to be sculpted as geldings.

Vikings III/40b complete

Everything to the left is extra bits of other armies or camp followers!