15mm Watch Tower

 I've been working on this thing off and on for probably three years...mostly off. I took the advice of a crafter on YouTube to build it out of cardboard. I won't be doing that again. While very inexpensive, it was very time consuming and boring. I used a dollar store Christmas gift box as the base as it were. The battlement was made by gluing the lid to the main part of the box and then cutting out chunks to make the merlons and the crenels. The part that took forever was cutting out and gluing the stones to the sides of the walls. I used pulp paper egg cartons. They have a nice bumpy texture. I ran out of egg cartons and used regular cardboard for the outside and inside of the battlement wall. I should have made the floor of the battlement out of stone, but for some reason, I made it to look like wood planks. I used strips of card board. 

I sealed it all with a mixture of Mod Podge and black craft paint and then kept dry brushing it with lighter and lighter grays. For the wood, I painted it with a honey brown craft paint and then used made a wash of Future floor wax and burnt umber paint. 

I think it turned out OK. The stones are not to scale, but I don't really care. It isn't meant for diorama purposes. 

Recently, I bought a sheet of pink insulation foam. I plan to use that for my next terrain project. 

Checking out 3D printed 15mm from Etsy

 There are a lot of interesting miniatures out there that can be printed, but until I take the plunge and buy my own 3D printer, I need to buy them pre-printed. I have already bought a lot of mostly aircraft, but lately I've been looking at fantasy figurines. Etsy seems to have a lot of shops that will print off figures, but most are in the 28mm to 32mm scale for TTRPG or in 10mm that is the latest craze. I came across one shop that had the license to print off various files and was willing to print off those pesky 10mm at 15mm. Unfortunately, I lost the packing slip and I can't seem to find the shop on the website. All I remember is that they are out of Poland.

I ordered these various foot troops.

They seem a little on the small side, but I will make a comparison once I've removed them from their stilts and base them. My big worry with all these printed miniatures is the possibility that things like thin weapons will get easily broken. Maybe some day they will make a printer resin that is like what Reaper Miniatures uses for their plastic figures that is reasonably hard but more flexible. 

As I recall, they weren't all that expensive compared to some of the other Etsy shops that sold comparable minis. The delivery time from Poland wasn't that bad either. Lately, some of the orders I've made from the UK seem to take forever. 

I will paint some of them up and see how they match up to existing 15s.

Sick of Being Sick Part 2

 Once again I have been hit hard with a respiratory illness. This time, it is pneumonia. My son had a really bad bout of influenza that knocked him out at the end of May and took him a week to recover. A week later, I got it bad and it morphed into pneumonia. Last week, I was feeling a little better but this past Tuesday, I reversed course. My oxygen levels were actually higher last week than they are now! So, after three chest x-rays, using a steroid inhaler, and lots of antibiotics, I am still feeling like crap. Wednesday, I go in for a CT scan. I have no physical energy and little desire to do anything. The depressing thing is that we were going to take this big family vacation to Texas over the 4th of July weekend to see my daughter who is doing an engineering internship and then we would all go visit Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. Well, we decided to cancel the whole thing. Fortunately, we could cancel the hotels with no penalties. I was really looking forward to this trip. We have not had a family vacation in at least a year, maybe more due to COVID. 

Anyway, as I said, I have had no physical or mental energy to do anything, including hobby stuff and academic (I have two manuscripts I had hope to be done by now). So, here are some figures I painted up over a month ago...I think (brain fog). 

I have been looking up friends and colleagues last names to see if they have a coat of arms. If the search hits show the same or very similar coats of arms repeatedly, I use them. Not that I go into too much depth in my research, but I found that the name of one friend, who is of southern Italian descent, was originally Norman. Another friend's last name, which is Greek, goes back to about the early 11th century. Both miniatures below are Essex15mm from their eastern European medieval range. They are mounted singly for more skirmishy games like Lion/Dragon Rampant.

 

The white things are supposed to be birds

COMBAT!

New Life for an Old Mini

 When I first jumped into 15mm medievals and fantasy, there was not a lot out there. One of the companies I discovered was Thistle & Rose Miniatures. I ordered some Norman knights to see what they looked like. This was before the days of online ordering. I painted them up but I don't know what happened to most of them. As I was cleaning my workbench, I found this guy. His horse was a mess. The legs had broken off. The rider was still intact. On a whim, I decided to see if he was compatible with any horses of other manufacturers. Lo and behold he was! He now rides an Essex unarmored horse.

I rarely, if ever, repaint any of my figures; only to touch them up if their paint is chipped. Keeping them the way they were originally painted is my way of keeping a record of my painting styles and progress over the years. So, while he has a more "advanced" painted horse, he is at the level of painting going back to the mid 90s. 

Size Comparisons

 Its been a crazy ten days. First, I drove up from here in eastern Tennessee to Indiana to pick up my daughter from university. Then, this past week, she and I drove about 15 hours from home to Texas for her engineering internship. I flew back and got in very late Saturday night. Yesterday was Mothers Day, but my wife did most of the cooking. I decided to take it easy today and have been preparing for a D&D that will hopefully happen sometime this summer. My co-workers are interested in having a game. 

I painted up these two right before my daughter and I left on our Texas road trip. I took some pictures now to show the difference in sizer between Essex 15mm and Khurasan Miniatures 18mm. I should have added an old Table Top, now Alternative Armies mounted knight for even more comparisons.

Khurasan from their late 14th Century range

Essex from their Feudal & Early Medieval range

Granted, the Essex knight is riding
a small horse, but what a difference!

As I've probably said in previous posts, the Khurasan infantry are not too out of place when side by side with other makes. I even took one of their mounted knights and stuck him on an Essex horse, and he didn't look too bad. It is their horses that seem gigantic. 

I am winding down this painting spree. My next task is the clean up the work bench. It needs it. I'm just going to close my eyes, hold my breath and throw out a lot of junk that is on there. I suffer from collecting do-dads and brick n' brac thinking I'm going to use this stuff for something. 

Can You Identify Me?

Long story as short as possible. I was rooting around in my big storage box for some 15mm Dark Ages heavy cavalry and came across this guy and seven of his identical brothers:

No horses seem to be associated with them. I would like to get more, but I have no idea who makes or made them. The spear and the softness of the metal screams Essex, but the chainmail does not. Besides Essex, I've looked at Chariot Miniatures and Gladiator Miniatures and have come up empty. If not Essex, my money is on Chariot. It might be a discontinued line. If anyone happens to know, let me know.

Look What I Got in the Mail, Part 2...

...Warmaster Ancients.

I ordered this along with Combined Arms, again from a third-party vendor on Amazon.com. I have the original Warmaster. I really like the rules, but never got around to playing them. Prior to publishing this, a number of pdf files came out with the rule adjustments and lists to make Warmaster into Warmaster Ancients. I never bothered to buy the book. I somehow lost both the files and the hard copies of them. I happened to see it, so I ordered it.

The rate I am going, I am so in need of a new bookshelf.

More 15 mm Medievals

Other than painting up a few figures from Splintered Light, I have not done a whole lot of work on my fantasy/medieval figures recently. I found some more shots of various 15 mm figures that I painted about four years ago:


Above are some late Medieval/early Renaissance heavy cavalry from Mirliton. They are from their Later Swiss and Burgundian Wars series, but I can't remember which catalog number. As I said before, I am not really into Renaissance figures, but these guys have a sort of Albrecht Dürer thing going on and spoke to me saying, "scruffy, battle-weary lancers for hire," especially the guy on the left. Mirliton puts in a lot of detail in their sculpting. The unfinished base is made from polymer clay.


The laddies above are Feudal Castings Highland archers with claymores. Feudal Castings are now produced by QRF Models. My historical knowledge of Feudal Castings is now fuzzy, but I think they came out in the early 90s. They don't have quite the detail that we see now in a lot of 15s. None the less, they do the job. I like the idea of having archers that can both shoot and be willing to mix it up in hand-to-hand combat. The claymores come separately. As I recall, they were very, as the British say, fiddly to get them glued onto their backs.