As many of you will know, the
Agincourt diorama built by TM Terrain and Perry Miniatures for the 600th
anniversary, has already moved to a permanent resting place at the Royal
armouries in Leeds. To promote this, the RA have organised a Hundred Years Wargaming weekend on 23 & 24 April, entitled RAGE.
On the Saturday, I’ll be putting on an Agincourt demo game,
using my figures and terrain – effectively a redux of the game at Salute last
year. Stuart Mulligan will be on hand too and we’ll consider any learnings of
the last game and consider any tinkering that maybe required (it was a French
victory last time!).
The French forces need to be
slightly enlarged in numbers. Although they were very close to the ratios which
Professor Anne Curry settled on in her many anniversary publications on the
battle; about 8,500 for the English and 12,000 for the French (9,000 nobles with men at
arms and 3,000 crossbow/urban militias).
So this now requires a
production-line approach to get as many dismounted knights & men at arms as possible to a tabletop state of readiness.
I’ve borrowed a speed-paint approach used by David Imrie recently on HYW figures. It seems
to be working OK, although the approach is very alien to me and I’ve had to
resist the temptation to add another highlight/shade/lining to the figures as
I’ve gone along. So assembled plastics have been sprayed with an enamel
undercoat shade of silver, followed by two layers of brown/black washes (Army
Painter and Games Workshop). Then non-metal areas have been blackened with a
single coat of main colour and a quick highlight only on highest points of
surcoats etc. If needed I may pick out highlights of pure silver on the plate
harness. Heraldry on these coats will be avoided - apart from a handful of
notables which Stuart is currently doing to his usual excellent standards - in
the interests of time.
The pics are just of the desk, with models at differing stages. I'm using the same colour palette for groups of 8-10 figures, which will be mixed up when based. They seem fit for purpose. So far I’m on track and once the figures have been based, some flags added and in rear ranks no one will ever know (except for you, dear blog
reader!).
I’ll post up some better quality progress pics over the next few weeks.
3 comments:
Congratulations :-)
These look great!
I absolutely love these models and if you are interested im doing some of them on my blog too ( http://breazbrushes.blogspot.nl/ ) but instead of using HYW setting im doing a fantasy setting (mainly just made up armies). I am really curious what it will look like once you have more stuff done. Im sure it will be impressive.
I saw your Agincourt game at Salute, it looked great and I'm sure these chaps will slot in well, one of the benefits of the white metal period that you can spray them silver give them a wash and they look that good!
Best Iain
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