Corvus Belli medievals (in Siocast)

[madaxeman]

At SELWG last year I picked up a box set of PSC's plastic re-casts of Corvus Belli's Medieval range - a set of figures I'd long admired but which had been OOP for quite some time.

My main interest was in the mounted knights, but the box set on the Bring & Buy I saw was nominally a full 100YW French army, however the composition was a bit limited for the rulese I use (ADLG) being about 20 mounted knights, 20-odd foot knights and the rest being a mix of pavise-holding spearmen and a LOT of crossbwmen - which I already had far too many of in metals.

Whoever had originally owned them clearly didn't fancy the Siocast figures all that much once they'd opened the box though, as this £45 RRP set was on offer for just a tenner - so at that price I snapped it up as I could just use even a few of the knights and get decent value from it! 

Of course, once I got started I decided to have a dabble at painting up some (but not all) of the others too, starting with these Pavise/Spear/Crossbow infantry units.



And here they are finished, in a pavise pattern inspired by the 28mm figures of Tony Rodwell that I faced at the PAW competition in January 2023. Once painted they (of course...) look no different to metal figures. These have always been a nice range IMO, and I'm happy to finally have gotten hold of some.



The Siocast debate does chunter on though, and having painted some up now I am starting to think that it might well be a case of over-selling the features and benefits of the material rather than anything else.

Flash is the thing that does keep being mentioned, and there was a little bit of flash on these figures, but there is on metals too - because this is a soft (actually surprisingly soft - almost Airfix-esque) material it is a little more tricky to scrape off any flash, especially in hard to reach areas as you are walking a bit of a tightrope between scraping the flash and cutting into the soft material of the figure.

However on reflection I suspect there's a different technique for removing flash from soft plastic figures to the one for scraping it off metals, so it may be "user error" here as much as anything else - again if this was made clearer then perhaps it's not a "mistake" I'd have made?   



I also primed them in black before painting - I have seen suggestions you can get away without doing so, but honestly why would you want to (or more to the point, why would anyone suggest that this is a selling point of the material)? You can of course paint metals with no primer too - it'll work, the paint will almost always stick onto the figure, but a primer coat is just, well, better - for paint adhesion, and for giving a base colour as well, and that's going to be as true for these guys as it is for any metal or resin range.

So, all in all once painted (sensibly, with a primer) they end up looking the same as metals - which is no real surprise I guess.

But perhaps that's the issue - they are "the same" models, but because they are made in a different material we somehow expect them to be "different" (or have at least been led to believe this by some over-enthusiastic marketing).

I'm very happy with how these guys came out, but there is still a small niggle in that I was surprised how soft the SioCast material actually was - and so for a material that feels "only a little more resilient than 1/72nd scale Airfix" it's hard not to feel that they should somehow be on sale at a much cheaper price point than the current "pretty close to the price of metals", no matter how nonsensical that thought might be given the huge differences in production methods and sales volumes between a niche 15mm medieval figure range and a box of Airfix 8th Army.

More pics on my blog at : https://www.madaxeman.com/index.php

[madaxeman]

As well as the Pavise infantry that I posted a few days ago, the main reason for buying the PSC Corvus Belli stuff was to get a new refreshed set of knights for the 100YW period, as my existing set of knights were starting to look rather tired and jaded.

I'd also seen some of what I think were Corvus Belli castings in Chris Tofalos' army at the Northern League event in Manchester at the end of last year, and really liked the bold and simple painting style, so wanted to see if I could emulate it.

So, here are the results:





I've gone for bold, generally single colour quarters for the horse barding, and (slightly counter-intuitively) have chosen not to co-ordinate the shield patterns with the barding. Sharp-eyed viewers will also note the reins are sometimes in colours that clash with the rest of the barding.



Many of the riders and horses are sort of tied together colour-wise, but by mixing it up a bit it I was able to introduce a bit more variety and colour into the unit - sometimes a same-colour shield, barding and tabard combination can look a bit of a wall of a single colour, especially on such small scale figures as these.

They have - as with the spearmen - come out identical to metal figures, with the only takeaway from putting these figures together being that in retrospect I wish I'd based them all a little closer together on each base, such that I could then have glued the three adjacent knight models together into a solid mutually supporting block.

This is because they do bend and flex quite unnervingly when you pick them up, especially the horses that are only attached to the base by one or two hooves, so I have a slight concern that this may lead to paint flaking or possibly some of the legs breaking off over time.

That may be unfounded worry on my part, but if all three Knights on each base were glued together it would make it more of a solid lump to pick up and use on the tabletop without any detrimental visual effect as they are pretty closely packed already.

More photos and commentary on my blog at : https://madaxemandotcom.blogspot.com/2023/03/corvus-belli-15mm-knights.html

[Rick F]

Nice job mate. I have the same army in metal, it's good to know they're exactly the same now in case I decide to get some more.

[Dolnikan]

They look really nice and I'm definitely interested in learning more about them (and seeing your paintwork). The uncoordinated barding and heraldry is something I've seen in manuscript illustrations so I guess it's historically accurate.

And one little question, but how are the spears and the like? Are they easy to get roughly straightened out?

[madaxeman]

They look really nice and I'm definitely interested in learning more about them (and seeing your paintwork). The uncoordinated barding and heraldry is something I've seen in manuscript illustrations so I guess it's historically accurate.

And one little question, but how are the spears and the like? Are they easy to get roughly straightened out?

In regard to the spears, the rather unsatisfactory answer is probably "not really, I'm not sure I tried hard enough but anyway these ones weren't too bent so for these guys it didn't really worry me enough to try harder".

I'm in the middle of finishing off some of the 100YW cavalry at the moment, and they have thinner spears which started off OK but now some of them seem to have become more noticably bent during undercoating (Halfords spray black) which is kinda weird really.  I bought them at Warfare last year, and they seem to be a harder plastic too so they may be a newer version of the resin - this is on the basis that Warlord use the same tech and have made a song and dance about "new" Warlord resin recently, and so I am guessing there's a possibility Siocast have changed their formulation and its filtered out to other users(?)

I have noticed a couple of other things with the cavalry. First up, you can't permanently bend the legs of the riders to grip around their horses better (which you can almost always do with metals) so if the riders are more bow-legged than the horses saddles (which these are somewhat), you are then dependent on glue alone to make a bond between the two.  It wasn't an issue on the knights, but the cavalry have a bit of a wider stance and a different fit.

Secondly drilling out a hand to take a new spear (which I tried to do on one of them as his bent spear was a bit too much to live with) needs careful planning and technique as you have to hold the figures' arm firmly in place pretty close to the point where you are drilling, as otherwise (being plastic) it wobbles about quite a lot when the drill bit touches it and starts to bite in.  The material is super-easy to drill, but a wobbly arm or leg means the hole can soon end up a bit of a mess.