IV/DBA 15mm Aztec army

These figures by Tin Soldier are some of my favorite 15mm sculpts ever.  The cartoony style isn't for everyone, but it has a flair all of its own.

Painting these figure posed two problems: 1) how to make them colorful without turning the army into a circus of clashing colors, and 2) I wanted to make them historically accurate.  The second one required many hours of research, but I'm happy with how they turned out.  All the colors are historical: the suits, the shields, even the banners are taken from contemporary illustrations of Aztec warriors.  As for ensuring the colors match, I decided to mix the colors, particularly a little of the light blue color into the widely used green, and vice versa.

The general stand features two suit warriors (nobles), a third noble with the hair, banner, and white shield of high status, and the general with a banner representing a God-bearer.  Supreme commanders also painted their skin red, which I've duplicated here.

There are two stands of priests (4xBd) in coyote suits.  These are my favorite stands in the army, especially the black and white figures.  The shield design on the lower left is the most common one to appear in the historical codexes.

The army list contains an additional optional unit of blades, which I've modeled as nobles (Eagle Knights) carrying shields particular to warriors from the capital, Tenochtitlan.  I'm not sure why they wore loincloths outside their suits, but apparently they did.

The bulk of the army is double-sized warbands (6x5Wb).  The bulk of these warriors were only allowed to wear plain white clothes and unadorned shields.   It isn't clear whether nobles fought amongst the tribal warriors or in completely separate units, so I took the liberty of adding one or two in each stand.  This adds color and I visualize them as lower-level leaders.  This picture shows two of the stands, but all six are unique color mixes.

The final stands are archers (2x4BW).  These wear the plain robes of the tribal warriors.

15mm Lancashire Games Mongols

I'm posting this so I can use the image at Fanaticus, hopefully more to come later.

Minifig Saxon Command

In my ongoing effort to drive off Harold's plundering army, I'm selling a pack of Saxon command figures.  It has eight sets of three figures (standard, general, horn blower).

When painted, they look like this:

For Sale: 15mm SF

Many years ago I owned a set of 15mm SF figures, troops in powered armor.  Oddly enough, the armor was painted bright orange. I don't know where I got them or what the painter's logic was for that choice, but somehow it worked.  Ever since then I've thought it might be fun to paint figures like that, so when I placed a recent order for some of Blue Moon's new 15mm 3 Musketeers line I ordered a couple packs of SF just for fun.

These figures are a pack of 10 Mercantile Bond Soldiers.  What that means I don't know, but I thought they looked cool.

I didn't have the courage to paint them orange, but I wanted some bright colors, so I brushed the eye-parts in neon green, reminiscent of a stereotypical night-vision goggle color.   It isn't visible from far away, but up close it looks good (IMHO).

The figures have an unusually large base, both wide and tall.   I wasn't quite sure what to do with it so I mounted them on pennies, painted the whole thing dirt brown, and flocked in contrasting colors.

They were a nice change of pace to paint, but I don't see myself gaming with them anytime soon so I'm selling them to raise money for my 10mm ECW project.

Game Night

There aren't many gamers up here on the mountain, so I've recruited new ones.  Some of the local homeschool kids enjoy Settlers of Cataan, Risk, and Axis and Allies, so I thought I'd help them progress from gateway games to something harder. 

Here they are at a recent game night, in our climactic final battle of the night: 3-on-3 DBA, with King Arthur's valiant British on one side, against the rapacious Picts and the treacherous Saxons.   Luckily for the British, their right flank broke the Pictish skirmishers before King Arthur's cavalry could get in too much trouble in the middle.

II/53 Ancient British

These guys have been in progress for a long time.   They started out as five partially-painted chariots I bought on eBay while looking for a chariot for my Picts.  It was a great deal, but I had these four extra chariots, so I've purchased other figures here and there to build an army around them.

Here is the full army, with camp.  The Ancient British, of course, were the folks that the Romans found when they arrived in Britannia in 55BC or so, under Julius Caesar.   In temperament and equipment, they resemble their Gallic cousins across the English channel.*

1xLch (general), 3xLch, 2xLh, 5x3Wb, 1x3Wb or 2Ps, 2xPs

Half of the army is Warbands, and this is where I spent the most time painting.   I used another painter's work (Hour of Wolves and Shattered Shields) as inspiration for these guys.  His are nicer than these, but even so, I like how they turned out. 

These are the psiloi (javelin-armed skirmisher) stands.   both these figures and the ones above are Old Glory 15mms.   I think they may have been from the same pack, and I just pulled out the spear-armed figures to use as skirmishers.   Buying a 32-figure pack of miniatures for 6 figures seemed excessive.

 For a long time the army languished like that, lacking only cavalry.  So when I ordered some Roman cav (see here for images) from Warmodelling.com, I added a pack of British cav to finish off the army.   They aren't my favorite Warmoddelling figures--I like the Romans better. 



DBA also requires each army have a camp, sort of a "home base," but custom gives great flexibility in what it looks like.  The Ancient British were known for "screaming women" and druids.  I combined those in this camp, of a man bringing his sheep for a druidic sacrifice--to ensure victory in the coming battle, of course.  The priestess is actually from a Chariot Miniatures wizards pack, and the man is from a Falcon Figures civilian pack.  The sheep I actually got from some HO railroad aficionado friends of my father.   I wasn't quite sure how the 15mm and HO scales would match, but it turned out quite well.  The altar I made with Sculpey.

It should be a fun army to play, with Warbands for the CHARGE! part, and chariots & Light Horse for the maneuvering part.  Colorful, too.

*I've read linguists arguing that the lack of Celtic words/structures in English suggests that the ancient British were more Germanic than Celtic.

Peninsualar British Artillery (15mm)

When I shipped these to the guy I painted them for, two howizter barrels vanished in transit.  Old Glory 15s was kind enough to send me new ones for free.  Kudos to wonderful customer service!