For the second base of the Burgundian men at arms I’m stretching my modelling capabilities to try and create a falling horse and rider, as the company will be charging the enemy. The Perry plastics make this conversion attempt possible of course and it’s one of the joys of the ‘plastic revolution’ that I can regress to past days of admiring this type of model conversions (typically more advanced than mine and usually in a larger scale) in Military Modelling magazine and have a go myself. Others have already done great plastic conversions with this range – notably ‘Captain Blood’ and ‘Admiral Benbow’ on the Lead Adventurers Forum.
Firstly the horse – some
hacksaw surgery involved here. After assembling the two body halves, both front
legs were cut off and repositioned further under the horse as it’s falling to its
knees after being hit by a crossbow bolt or handgun shot (so far I’ve resisted
adding an arrow/bolt shaft into the horse’s chest, but I may yet do this). The
repositioned legs were pinned, glued and the gaps filled with Procreate putty.
The horse’s head and neck were realigned. The head was cut from the neck and
then a largish wedge of neck cut away. Head and neck were then re-united with
plastic cement. The attachment of the neck to the body was also repositioned
and glued further forwards after the joining ‘lug’ was trimmed to fit, to get
the head as low as possible. This left a gap at the joint near the saddle,
which was filled and the mane extended over the new neck extension with more
putty. The cast-on reins were removed with a scalpel and replaced with fuse
wire. This created the wounded horse.
I initially wanted the rider
to be dramatically falling in mid-air over the horse’s neck – having found
pictures of race jockeys falling from their mounts. However it proved too difficult
for me to achieve a convincing pose with the figures (and my capabilities), so
I post-rationalised that a man in full harness was less likely to be shot
through the air as a smaller modern day jockey! Therefore he’s still in the
saddle – but pitching forwards with the velocity of the horse’s fall, arms out
to try and protect himself from imminent impact with the ground.
I used the legs from a plastic
man at arms, cut off at the waist. These were joined to the torso of a fully
armed figure on the command sprue in the Perry Mins ‘Bills and Bows’ box. Some
filling was required to cover the join of the armour plates. The rider’s left
arm is also from the same command sprue as the body. The right arm was selected
from the mounted men at arms box, with the angle adjusted slightly (pinned and
filled under the armpit) and with fingers grafted from a spare plastic
longbowman’s hand. I’ve chosen an open barbute, as the face has an open mouthed
expression which should work nicely to reflect the shock of the impending fall
– I’ve given it a wash of GW Green Stuff as I’ll probably paint it as a
fabric-covered helmet.