Charlie's Perry Miniatures medieval blog - UPDATE at last! 3rd Feb

[Hendrid]

All very interesting Charlie, an good thread to follow.

I like your painting style and your kit-bashing is producing some very fine mini's.

[Vermis]

Looking good. I think Captain Blood has a point - I'd be hard-pressed to tell these from the plastic minis after you've painted them.

I've managed to successful paint a bit of stubble on their faces. Lots of my soldiers from now on will be sporting 5 o clock shadows!

There's a point. I take it clean-shaven was the fashion in 15thC western europe? Not much face fungus going round?

And congrats.

[grant]

Stunning collection!

[Charlie_]

Thanks for all the comments guys!

Five more, a grim looking bunch. I'm very please with the swordsman - the arms are from the 100 Years War set.



And here's a couple of conversions I came up with.... I wanted to make use of the bodies from the 100 years war set, but as the heads aren't separate and couldn't really be replaced without skilled sculpting work (the joys of bascinets and aventails), I was struggling to see how I would. I've done one with WOTR arms, but he looks far too 'archaic' amongst the others for my liking.

But I've found they are very easy to cut through the waist, separating the torso from the legs. I can do the same with the WOTR foot knight set, and voila....



They don't look like anything special, but doing this gives me even more options for bodies in full harness. The one on the right gives me another standing pose, great for command figures, and the one on the left gives a great new running pose. They both just need some minor green stuff work to fill the gaps, but its pretty much a clean cut on both of them above the swordbelt. I think the one on the left has worked the best, and I'll be matching those same legs with that torso at least once more...
So technically the leg armour is 'out of fashion', but who's gonna notice?

Also, I got some movement trays custom made from Warbases. I always found archers annoying to rank up, even when modelled to have the front rank firing and the second rank not. They just seem to be stepping on each other's heels.... They need space to fire those longbow!!! I asked warbases about making me some trays with a 10mm gap between ranks, and they said.... Not a problem! I've got lots of them made, 2 deep with frontages from 5 to 10 wide... And also some single rank ones, which can be added to make three rank units as well. I have a box full of movement trays which are gonna cover pretty much any formation I wanna put my units into.

The custom designed tray you can see on the bottom left. I cannot recommend warbases enough - not only will they make ANY size or configuration of laser-cut base and movement tray you want, but their prices are very affordable!

[Mick_in_Switzerland]

Thanks for the tips about the conversions.  I had not thought of cutting the figures at the waist -it gives me some new options to play with;)

Warbases are a great company as you say.
I have bought movement trays for my Agincourt Project, Swiss Burgundy Project and Modern Skirmish from Warbases.
They are very good, affordable and quick.
I received the Warbases casualty markers yeterday so I will do some converted figures for them.

[Charlie_]

Goodness me, nearly a month without an update? My pace has slowed a little through October as I've been rather busy with work, but I'm back on track now!

So, where were we....

I now need to stop playing around with making interesting characters and start bulking out the core infantry.

I decided I needed more painted up in the House Tully colours of red and blue....





This one is a metal Perry, from their WOTR standard bearers set.



And some 'neutrals'...



I now have enough billmen/halberdiers and archers to start putting them together into formation!



I also placed an order with Crusadar miniatures. Their 'War Of The Roses' range (perhaps '15th century' would be a better label) looked really good to me, and potentially great to mix in with the Perrys. Well, it arrived the other day, and I'm very impressed! Very nice models. And notably 'cleaner' metal when compared to the Perry metals - barely any cleanup needed, no missing details, etc... In particular the archers look fantastic, and the 'pikemen' are gonna make great standard bearers, of which I am going to need a lot. Looking forward to painting these!



And in other news, I've been designing my own banners, and think I have finally 'cracked it'. I went and got these printed off today, and am very happy. The next batch will feature a few flags. Some of these are GoT houses from the Riverlands, whereas others are 'generic' ones I've made up myself (some of which I will give names and histories to, so they can be placed in the GoT world).

[OSHIROmodels]

A worthy update 

cheers

James

[tyrionhalfman]

Another great update, thanks

[Captain Blood]

Coming on apace now. The Crusader longbowman does look surprisingly good.

[tomrommel1]

nice update indeed

[Charlie_]

Thanks guys!

Here's the latest batch, featuring a few interesting things.



Some more soldiers for House Tully. The banner we have already seen in a larger size... If you remember, the 'fantasy fish banners' I got from Flags Of War was fantastic but surprisingly large, so it did not actually fit onto the banner poles that come with the Perry kits. It works fine for a main army standard, but as I'm going to have lots of these flags spread across the army, I asked Iain at Flags Of War if it was possible to get it in smaller sizes as well. He said no problem, so I got some in 30mm and 20mm square. This is the 20mm one.

The archer on the far right is one of the Crusader Miniatures metals. I really like how he came out! I'm definitely gonna be painting up more of these and mixing them in with the Perry plastics. They are pretty much a perfect match in terms of scale once you've added a few mm to their bases, perhaps a bit more slender in appearance. The one weak point is the hand holding the bow, so I'll be replacing these with plastic Perry bow hands in future where possible.



And here are two banners I made myself! Those who have read A Song Of Ice And Fire may (perhaps) recognise it as the heraldry of House Bracken, a vassal of House Tully. I designed it using the Coat Of Arms Design Studio form Inkwell Ideas as a starting points (http://inkwellideas.com/coat_of_arms/free-version/), and then adjusted it into a square shape (rather than a shield) and added a bit of 'rippling' which you can't really see to be honest. I got it printed off, along with six other designs, on a variety of different papers from different stationary shops.... And agonised over which to choose (the colours came out differently each time, some were great but too thick and wouldn't 'bend'). Some of the other designs I still haven't managed to get right when printed off, but for some reason this one just worked with no problems.

The banner bearer on the left is another from Cruasader Miniatures, and the one on the right I've actually already posted a while back with an inferior banner. I decided he needed something better, so chopped off his plastic flag pole, drilled out his hands and gave him a new wire one. This is actually my first time drilling out hands and using wire spears, so I was apprehensive at first, but I pulled it off ok and gotta say it looks much better!



For all these smaller vassal houses, I plan to have one 'big' banner to accompany the head of the house, and one or two smaller ones to assign to units when needed.

That's all for now!

[AWOL]

You're really displaying the versatility of the Perry plastics, there's loads of good conversions in here.
Impressive painting, too. 

[tyrionhalfman]

Nice additions. Lovely colourful banners. Thanks for sharing

[LordOdo]

Oh I like the idea of the amount of banners! Great execution too!

[pocoloco]

Just read through the thread in one go, top notch work all around!

This might just push me to purchase Perry plastics again