The Norman Conquest (of my desk at least)

Yes, I know, I know. I've been terribly slack at keeping the blog up to date recently. It really is a very poor show. Still, real life things seem to be going very well at the moment and I've been able to do a little painting, so, having finally got around to taking some photos, I thought I'd get a post up and share them with you.

Man the new Blogger photo upload thing sucks! I'm really not sure what they thought they were doing with it, but now I only seem to be able to upload a single photo at a time (although the message says "your photos are being uploaded"!) and although it's nice that I can pick settings before I add the photo, I can't pick Extra Large and I don't get a progress bar. When you change your UI, you're meant to make it better, not worse...

Anyway, rant over, let's have a look at some models.

If you remember, the target for April was to get a unit done for Saga, and the Sword Dancer cavalry for VBCW. You won't see any of the Sword Dancers in this post I'm afraid. They were all painted, and I managed to take advantage of the twelve minutes this month when the rain stopped to get them varnished. They were sat on a bit of card outside being sprayed, and a gust of wind flipped the card over, dashing the brave Sword Dancers onto the flagstones below. It was carnage, and some repairs are needed before they're photo ready.

But I didn't break my hearthguard! I'm following the same basic colour scheme with these as with my Anglo Danes - muted-ish colours generally, simple geometric shields, and colour coded bases to tell the unit types apart.

These models are from the Gripping Beast set I won for "best painted" at the Winter is Coming event we ran at Wargamers Free Company a while ago. They're really nice, but they came with metal spears and I've copied Andy's technique for replacing them with florist's wire.

Speaking of Winter is Coming, this month I also took part in Spring Tide, the latest WFC Saga event. This was ably run by JP, and through the genius of his final scenario I was able to rack up loads of kills, winning myself a copy of the new Northern Fury add on!

While we were there we got an extra discount at Wargames Emporium, and I took advantage to get myself the eight Norman crossbowmen you see here - currently painted and needing some ink.

With all the dark ages models I try to make each model an individual and mix up the colours as much as I can - especially for a skirmish game this just seems right to me. The crossbows form my "wild card" for the month and I've really enjoyed doing them, even though they're quite simple - I think I'm just in a Saga mood at the moment. I'm playing aggressively in the club campaign so having these to take my Norman force up to a sensible 5 points (without using unmounted melee troops which Normans can't do much with) will come in handy!

Just need to ink these and fix up the broken Sword Dancers, and I'm done for April...