Burgundian Siege (2)

I'm on the cusp of recommencing painting more Swiss & Burgundians - I've totted-up howmany figures I need to do for a large Berne pike block and some supporting halbards. It's a worryingly large number, so I'm going to have to find a way of speeding up my painting, with some adjustments to my established style, if I'm going to hit the Partizan game deadline. Last task is to clear the piles of clutter that seem to regularly build up on my painting desk, so I'll have a 'fresh start'.

In the meantime, I need to decide on whether the Burgundian siege lines get priority. Here are a couple of images of artillery crew that are ready for a lick of paint. Mainly Perrys, who have mostly had some minor changes made to vary them up a bit. I'm also to decide if the 3 siege bases will be stand-alone vignettes, with figures embedded for life into the groundwork, or will the figures etc be on the usual bases, so they have applications beyond this game; leaning to the latter at the moment. Toodle-pip for now. Will show these again, along with some others planned, when the paint is dry.

Burgundians Siege works (I)

As I obliquely referenced last time, there is plan afoot to put on a demo game at Partizan show in May, based on the Battle of Morat. This will include using all my figures and I am now on a deadline, which feels a lot closer than it really is, to expand my Swiss army and to create some seige lines for the Burgundians. These will be a static disply at one side of the table. The references for these will be images from contemproary chronicles of seiges, there were plenty shown in the Swiss Berne chronicles and elswhere. I recently purchased the excellent and highly recommended book by Graham Turner on the Wars of the Roses and I'm also using his painting of the siege of Bamburgh castle too.

So first start on this has been made, with a vignette of some figures from Graham's painting transposed to Morat. A herald is startled by the firing of a seige gun. The other picture are a few crossbowmen who'll be making their way to the palisaded fence. These are Perry conversions, with a couple of Steel Fist bodies included. At the moment the plan is for 3 adjoining bases of A4 size.

More will follow as I make progress.

Swiss Mounted Crossbowmen

Thanks for all the feedback on the last post. For 2025, I need to turn my attention and pretty much all the spare painting time I have, to expand my Swiss army to a size that I can game with it. Plans are afoot for a demo game and more on that in a later post.

Late last year, I added a unit of mounted crossbowmen. In fact I did 4 bases, which doesn't tally with my usual 3 bases for a gaming unit, so I'll probably need to add more. They are Perry plastic riders, largely from the versatile Light Cavalry box, with some arms pinched from Perry HYW plastics. The inspiration for these were some done by Matt Bickley, the images of which he shared with me - so these are a bit of a homage to those. I took a couple of pics of the asssmbled figures, so you should be able to see some of the attachments of limbs to bodies etc. I decided to use standing horses for these, as my understanding is that crossbows were fired from the saddle - certainly there are images from hunting and warfare of this. Whilst the Swiss Chronicles and the Battle of Dornach illustrations depict horses at the gallop, I decided on showing them firing and loading whilst taking shots from the edge of the battlefield, in a skirmish-type role. So for the horses I had to pick out Perry metals in walking and standing poses, largely from their Wars of the Roses/European Armies range. I also prefer the size of the horse, as they're slightly smaller and so look more akin to modest mounts (not destriers). The fit to the rider is OK, with a bit of trimming of the rider's legs and of course the need to build saddles from putty.

I added small pavises to some of them, as I wanted to use the plastic ones that I have left over from the Perry plastic HYW Knights box. They represent Berne, so a couple of bears were painted.

I'm happy with the results.