Saga Franks, with exotic mercenaries!

[Battle Brush Sigur]

Add-on to a Fankish Saga army I made in 2015/16! It was an interesting project, since the gentleman I build and paint these for is a big fan of plastic figures. So everything in the army has to be made from plastic figures. Except for ONE figure, which you can see below. Otherwise, the only metal in that army is paperclips used for pinning.


"Sound the alarm! Exotic steppe warriors gather to raid the village!"

24 levy troops, Gripping Beast Dark Age Warriors, including a motivational speaker (the first and only metal figure in this army!):


4 mounted veterans, made from a mix of Conquest Games Norman Knights and Gripping Beast Saxon Thegns:





 ...and here's something exotic - Pechenegs (as Mounted Steppe Warrior Mercenaries)!

These are built from the Heavy Arab Cavalry box from Gripping Beast. The gentleman I'm building and painting the army for had seen the Pechenegs in a movie, thought they were exciting, and sent me a screenshot for reference:





So the guys were supposed to look wild and un-fancy. They also had to look un-Arabic (because they weren't Muslims at the time), and they all had to be equipped with bows.
The construction was time-consuming, because the poses for bows are limited for the heavy Arabian cavalry. Here and there I used a head from another box.



Normally I would have made them colorful, but that wasn't possible. So I took refuge in the trick of painting saddlecloths as cowhides and other animal skins and painting on textures. Arrow quivers were covered with fragments of paper tissues soaked in glue to give them texture too.



So these guys were an interesting challenge, but I think it worked out, and they look suitably different to the rest of the army and have a rather unique look now.

Hope you like them!

[Ran The Cid]

Fabulous!  That's one hell of a project.

[OSHIROmodels]

Nicely done mate 

[Little Odo]

Those are rather lovely. Great work on both the conversions and the paint jobs.

[.:Gunslinger:.]

Super cool! I love projects like these where to have to fit within a specified outline with limitations that can lead to more creativity. 

It shows greatly in how you treated thoses Pechenegs, the cowhides and the work on the quivers really set them apart.

[Battle Brush Sigur]

@Ran The Cid: Thanks very much!

@OSHIROmodels: Cheers, appreciated!

@Little Odo: Thanks! The conversions are not earthshattering stuff, but took long enough.

@.:Gunslinger:.: Thank you! Yeah, it's probably not a bad thing to get challenged every once in a while. Especially over the past few years I started going for much more vibrant colours over all too sharp or contrasty higlihghts and shades. I am a big fan of textures though, especially with figures from that period.

Just for completeness' sake, here's some more pictures of units from that army.

Archers


heavily-armoured flamish mercenaries, along with the archers


Frankish warriors:


Saxon mercenaries:


Horsemen:






...and their warlord:


I'm pretty sure that I haven't posted them on LAF before, so I hope that you like them! They're seeing some action again now that their owner got into a new wargames club, so I got to add some more units.

[James Morris]

Excellent work! I’m really enjoying the combination of kits!

[Davies]

Beautiful as ever. And a good idea for the pechenegs, which I'm going to shamelessly steal for my byzantine army.

[Battle Brush Sigur]

@James Morris: Thanks muchly! Yeah, it's an interesting premise for an army, but of course the past 10 years spoilt us with suitable plastic kits for the period. Part of why I used these particular kits was because the gentlemen I built and painted these for still had them lying around and wanted to use them up.

@Davies: Cheers! Sure, do go ahead. :-) I just looked at the light arab horsemen/horse archers box by Gripping Beast to see if they'd fit better, but in terms of riders, I think that the heavy horsemen box works better to represent Pechenegs (again, possibly with some head swaps from other plastic kits such as Dark Age Warriors and such.

[Dags]

Not really keen on the minis (apart from, unsurprisingly,  the metal one  ) but the painting is top notch 

[syrinx0]

Lovely stuff.  Great to see how you paint historical figures too.

[.:Gunslinger:.]

Fantastic painting! You manage to upgrade these older plastic kits quite a bit with your paintjob...damn now I am thinking on working on Saga again

[Battle Brush Sigur]

@Dags: Thanks very much! Yes, I mean they're multi-part plastics, and it's suprisingly hard to make these Dark Age Warriors for instance make look a bit diverse if 16 out of the 20 are armed with javelins, but that sort of stuff has to take a backseat to their game use. They're actually pretty nice to paint, but of course a metal figure will always have a superior pose (and often better faces) to a plastic one. It all comes with up- and downsides. The fact that the whole army must be made of plastic of course was an interesting concept. At this point in time, I think I'd go metal, even with a collection of up to 50 figures or so. Plastics do have an immense allure though of course. I got a cupboard full of plastic Napoleonics, all for which I have plans, and all of the figures are still on sprue... For more historical figures, I just painted a buch of 28mm Napoleonics and posted them over here: https://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=146920.msg1880008#msg1880008

@syrinx0: Thanks! Yus, I love painting historicals. I mean it's all in the mix really. That's the main thing that keeps me going. Also, for my own private gaming, I'm more of a historical guy probably. I just happened to paint a whole bunch of Fantasy figures lately just because I had to get them done. If I had more spare time I'd get some Chain of Command and Napoleonic stuff done. I also bought a whole lotta 15mm Vietnam stuff (and almost kinda wish I'd gone 10mm, but since Brexit availability of anything off-side the broad things [GW, Battlefront, ...] has become a bit annoying to get) earlier this years; hoping to get going on that at some point. Speaking for my own stuff strictly, The Next Game always is the main motivator, and somehow the number of games I play derteriorated since the pandemic (with a good bit of a surge of solo gaming during 2020/early '21), but the next games [with my own figures] for me right now are either 5th edition Warhammer Fantasy or Chain of Command, for which we just started another campaign two weeks ago.

@.:Gunslinger:.: Thank you; much appreciated. Yeah, I rather enjoy trying to make sculpts which others might dismiss as not being up to their own personal standards presentable or even nice. Anybody can make a top-of-the-line supersculpt look decent, but I think that pretty much any figure can be made to look pretty. There is only one figures range I dislike (and I feel bad for saying that, because I painted quite a lot of them), but I just don't agree with those figures in terms of concept, quality, suggested colours/style of reference illustrations and material and that's the Gloomhaven/Frosthaven boardgame figures. I won't say 'no' if somebody asks me to paint them, because that would be just misplaced arrogance, but I won't particularly look forward to it. But that's rather off-topic. As for Saga - fun fact, Saga was one of the first historical wargames I played, right along with DBA. And the only rulebook I ever sold again (because a dude in Australia needed it at a time at which the 1st edition rulebook was impossible to get, but I probably wouldn't have played it again anyway). It's a great game with loads of cool things in there, like the excellent Fatigue system, but I couldn't get over the battleboards and the fact that you have to learn them by heart, as well as your opponent's as well. Surely after 3 games you'd have them down, but somehow I never got to that point. But it's a very smart game and ever since it appeared it's been a constant thing with wargames groups.

[syrinx0]

Yeah, same here. My gaming has decreased significantly after the pandemic as our gaming group slowly disbanded.  Painting for me has actually increased a bit as I want to complete projects and enjoy painting.  Now if only I can get your level of highlighting...

[Captain Darling]

Very well painted and assembled!
The lack of love for plastic figures is interesting, they are cheap, often better detailed than their metal counterparts, much more easily 'adjusted' and as I get older easier to cart around! That said I reckon I have more metal figures than plastic ones 😕 also maybe all irrelevant with the era of 3D printing upon us...
Anyway you've created an impressive army well done 🙂!