Tuesday 25 September 2012

Saxon Warband Part 1

This is the first unit of my Saxon Warband, twelve stout hearted conscripts. These troops are recruited from the villages and settlements of the warlord's territory. They are not highly trained soldiers with good equipment, but farmers and herdsmen, hunters and woodsmen, armed with a spear and a shield and maybe a helmet or axe.

The bulk of the unit is made from the Wargames Factory Saxon Fyrd boxset, with a few bits courtesy of Gripping Beast. I wanted to arm them with mostly spears, as this denotes their lesser status. Swords would be restricted to the warlord's elite troops, but axes I reckon would be fairly accessible to villagers and commoners.

For the palette I had a good look around on the web and in my history books. There's no definitive answer to how the clothes would have looked, so I went with a pragmatic approach of fairly neutral and muted colours. The shields I decided on a fairly uniform palette, to tie the unit together. There's no real world evidence that I can find to describe how the shields would have looked, what colours or symbols would have been used, only that they would have probably been made from wood with leather stretched over the rims. So I scraped off the nails and treated the shield rims as leather rather than metal.

The bases are pennies, they are the ideal size for these figures. There's a bit of work building up the ground to level with the raised plastic tab, but it's nothing too complex - I just glued on two layers of sand. Modern pennies are magnetic, so I can re-use these figures at a future date in a magnetic movement tray, if I want to progress to element or unit based games, such as Dux Bellorum, Clash of Empires or Hail Caesar. But for now, this is the first unit of my Saga Saxon warband, weighing in at a whopping one and a half points. Next up, a dozen armoured saxons.


4 comments:

TWD said...

Nice job on some not very nice models. Love the GB plastics, but those WF ones are poor. Hopefully the GB unarmoured ones'll be available soon.
Tom

Minitrol said...

Wargamers - devaluing currency since ageeees ago.

I was very curious on your approach to historical. Usual method? Midtones then sahede depths some glazes then weathering?

Great job.

Nord said...

Painting is very simple, base coat and a glaze or two, wash is too heavy for my tastes. Weathering is just stippling on the browns as I drybrush the bases.

Tom, the necks have to be trimmed, but otherwise I think these are fine. What is it you find poor?

TWD said...

I think the posing leaves a lot to be desired, the detail is soft, the necks are too long and don't fit and life's too short to paint poor miniatures.
:)
Tom

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