In a bid to empty my medievals box, I started painting my foot knights and men-at-arms. These are mostly old Grenadier figures sculpted by Mark Copplestone for their Fighting Men line. Mark is perhaps my favorite sculptor and I really like these figures.

There are a few others mixed in, from various sources. Like the Fantasy Warlord figure with the yellow shield, who is straight out of a Gary Chalk picture. Gary did most of the illustrations for Fantasy Warlord and I guess the sculptors used them for inspiration. Not that I mind, Gary is perhaps my favorite fantasy illustrator. Now, if I only could get a figure sculpted by Mark based on one of Gary's paintings...

It's been ages since I last did plate armor. It was interesting, but not as fast as you might assume because a lot of time is spent on detailing. And you need to do the detailing or they'll end up looking like terminator robots or something.

This is the first batch. I actually pulled out a bag which happened to contain 33 figures, but after priming I decided to do these 20 first. I'll work on the remaining ones after a while, but once they are finished I actually don't have a whole lot of medieval figures left -- except the 100+ plastic archers ofcourse.

I'll probably need to get more at some point, probably some Black Tree HYW figures because I really like them and they make great rank and file. Here you see another experiment: I couldn't find a suitable transfer so I asked my daughter to paint the shield design. As you can see, she's the one with the talent in the family.

I really gotta get back to those UNIT troopers at some point to rekindle her interest in figures. I have everything, I just need to dig up the stuff (easier said than done).

Meanwhile, I'm not quite sure what to do with the medievals. I keep hearing about this musical game of chairs or somesuch, perhaps they could be usable in such a setting? Or maybe I'll dig up a Jean figure from somewhere and throw the pesky English out of France. Or, given the number of archers I have, perhaps I should be looking for Richard? Apparently he was last spotted near Bosworth looking for a ride.

I'm sure Saara will be delighted to paint 100 more shields...

In other news, the VOTOMS thing is progressing. I basically finished basing all my One Coin figures and did one of the vinyl gashapon figures as a test piece. They are a little bit smaller, but at least the Berserga here is reasonable close. I have to say soft vinyl is not my favorite modelling material, but after a bit of weathering at least it looks reasonably ok. I have a few Beetles and Turtles and actually a reasonable amount of Scopedog variants, plus a hefty bunch of Fattys still left to do. All in slightly disparate scales, ofcourse. All in all many more than can reasonably used in this scale anyway...

Now I'll just have to write some rules to use with these.

On the research front I lucked into something a bit extraordinary. I had to use a gift card to a local bookstore, which is harder than it sounds because I rarely buy anything from the local bookstore -- they simply carry very few books I have interest in.

However, this time I stumbled upon a very nice looking book about the Finnish involvement in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 (there were actually several in the latter half of the 19th century).

These wars are not very well covered in English language sources. Hey, if the Light Brigade was not there, who gives a hoot, right?

This could actually be an interesting subject for a game project. The book is very well illustrated with contemporary art, but coming up with the figures may be a bit problematic. I'm not aware of any ranges specifically covering this period, but I guess some other ranges might be usable. For example, if you look at the turks in the cover picture, they are very close to ACW Zouaves (not surprisingly in a way). Franco-Prussian war figures might also be repurposed for this.

I'll have to try to get some other sources though. The art while very nice, seems to take some artistic liberties as well. The troops are not quite wearing different uniforms for every picture, but completely uniform they are not either...

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