15mm Welsh Army Completed

The recent completion of Viking allies means the Welsh army is now complete. I thought therefore I'd assemble them together as a group and take a few pictures:

The entire army took just over three months and totals 505 figures excluding the 78 Vikings, comprised of 36 horses and 469 foot and medium and heavy cavalry:

The core of the base army are the warband figures but the South Welsh option allows these to be substituted in favour of superior bow, which is what first attracted me to the army:

They have actually had their first game against some Feudal English which ended up being quite a balanced affair with the Welsh prevailing. Unfortunately I again forgot to take any photos:

I have included the Vikings allies here although I have since decided to commence work on their own army as a separate project:

All the figures are from Forged in Battle with shield transfers by Little Big Men Studios:

Next up however I am planning to complete the three English Civil War armies I have had on hold. I have essentially finished nearly all of the foot and artillery but still have twenty-five or so regiments of Royalist, Parliamentarian and Scottish Covenanter cavalry to complete. I'm hoping to get through them all before Christmas, by which time I'm sure I'll be keen to get stuck into some Vikings.

Dark Ages Vikings 15mm

The Welsh army list allows up to twenty elements of Viking allies which are classified as blade. A useful addition to stiffen the resolve of the Welsh fast warband and bow:

The figures are again Forged in Battle and are lovely sculpts with lots of variety. I was originally planning on doing the full twenty elements of four figures each, using seventy-eight Vikings from the three packs I had ordered with two spare Welshmen to complete the required complement of eighty. However I enjoyed painting these so much I have decided to go the whole way and order the rest of a full Viking army, so completed the first nineteen elements using only Vikings:

These are Viking Bondi figures, the Bondi being farmers and settlers. Given the Welsh Viking allies are from Ireland I thought these would be best to use:

The shields are a mixture of Little Big Men studio transfers, while the quartered shields have simply been hand-painted:

Some quite dynamic poses in among this lot:

That is the Welsh army now finished. The rest of the Vikings are currently en route so it might be a few months before I get back to them. In the meantime the plan is to get cracking on some English Civil War cavalry regiments so I can finally complete the three armies for that project.

15mm Welsh Cavalry and Light Infantry

The last couple of weeks saw the completion of twelve elements of Welsh cavalry including two command elements:

This is a mixture of heavy cavalry, seen here in the front rank, which can also double as 'knights' as per the Northern Welsh option in the DBMM army lists:

The lighter or ordinary cavalry are arranged here in the second rank:

These included some quite characterful figures with a fair bit of variety:

I again used Little Big Man Studio decals on those figures carrying shields:

The only minor quibble is that some of the figures sit awkwardly on their mounts, an issue I have found before with the otherwise excellent Forged in Battle figures. This therefore requires a bit of manipulation to get them to sit straight and with enough of a contact point for the glue:

I also completed fifteen elements of auxiliary troops and a dozen elements of light skirmish infantry:

The Welsh light infantry is classified as inferior. This usually means they aren't carrying shields so I primarily used those sculpted without to represent skirmishers, albeit with a couple carrying shields mixed in for variety:

The remainder have been based as auxiliary infantry:

This is all the actual Welsh figures for the army now finished. All that remains is to complete another twenty elements or eighty figures of Viking allies to complete the army.

15mm Welsh Warband

The next major tranche of my early medieval Welsh project was to complete sixty elements of fast warband which, as they are based the same, will also double as the Northern Welsh fast pike option:

The figures are again Forged in Battle. If I'm totally honest these are not my favourite of their figures as there was a bit of flash to tidy up, but once done and painted up I think they are more than passable:

As with most in the Forged in Battle range the packs contain a variety of poses which always helps to keep the motivation going:

I have again stuck to mainly neutral colours with lots of greens, browns and greys:

I was originally going to keep the shields neutral as well, but in the end decided they needed a bit of a lift so purchased some Little Big Man Studios transfers to add a bit of interest. They don't make any for Forged in Battle Welsh so I took a chance on some Carolingian transfers which, because they were made for the FiB Carolingian figures, weren't a perfect fit and required a fair bit of trimming and/or painting to blend them in:

The other thing I have noticed is that LBMS shields used to come ready-punched with the central area for the steel shield boss removed. I never realised this but I believe that Stephen Hales, the talented designer, used to manually punch the holes himself. 

Since the collaboration with Victrix, who now distribute his range, they have decided to distribute them unpunched. No matter as I ended up purchasing a set of plier hole punches and it was quite fun, although I am still finding small sticky dots that I have inadvertently deposited around the house:

These figures took me a lot longer than I had originally planned, mainly because I headed off to New Zealand for five days in late June and also because I had to commit a week to grandfather duties. Nevertheless, this does mean another 180 figures (well, 182 actually as I have two spares I am planning to use elsewhere) toward the project and I feel like I am now on the home straight. Next up, some light and auxiliary Welsh infantry.

15mm Welsh Bowmen

I enjoyed painting my four Forged in Battle 15mm Arab armies so much I wanted an excuse to paint one more FiB army before moving on, and so purchased some Early Medieval Welsh on a bit of a whim.

While the base DBMM army list calls for lots of warband there is an option in a South Welsh army to replace some or all of these with irregular longbow. These are classified in the rules as the rather deadly superior bow, so I decided to tackle these first:

There are sixty-two elements in total with ten based as light troops (psiloi) and the remaining fifty-two elements as superior bow, comprising one hundred and eighty-two figures in total:

The psiloi are two to a base:

With the irregular bow based in threes (if they were regulars they would be four to a base):

There are six different figures in the Forged in Battle bow packs, although these are based upon three distinct body types with different heads:

I tried to keep the colours relatively subdued with predominantly different shades of browns, greens and greys, and will stick to this for the remainder of the Welsh and their small contingent of Irish allies:

Next up will be the warband which will be almost exactly the same number of figures again. I have a fair bit on over the coming weeks but hope to have the bulk of these done by the end of June.

15mm Ghurid Army Completed

No posts for a while as I have been busy working on sixty-five elements of two hundred and sixty pikemen to complete a Ghurid army, the last of the quartet of my middle Eastern armies for DBMM, and because they are all the same figures I wanted to wait until they were all complete:

The Ghurid dynasty was another short-lived empire based in Afghanistan between 1149 and 1215 AD. They conquered the Ghaznavids and, like the Ghaznavids, pushed into India. There is therefore a fair bit of overlap between the Ghanavid and Ghurid army lists with the main difference being that the latter utilised mail-coated foot and were armed armed with a long spear, usually carrying a 'karwah' or pavise. Unfortunately no manufacturer makes a specifically Ghurid foot figure carrying a karwah, but Forged in Battle do a nice long-spear armed and chain-mail armoured Arab figure which ticks all the other boxes quite nicely:

There are six poses in each pack, and only four outside the two command figures, so by the time I got to figure two hundred and sixty I had seen a lot of the same poses:

These are however nice crisp castings so it was not as big a chore as it otherwise might have been:

There is an option in the army list to double-base the figures. This has the advantage of reducing the points cost of the second rank which can still lend support to the first, but a disadvantage in that if the first rank gets killed the second goes with it:

I opted to base forty-two of the elements on double bases:

And twenty-three on single bases. There was no way I was going to paint an additional couple of hundred figures to accommodate this variation and the double-based figures can still be nominated as single elements when required, with the single-based elements acting as loose change.

April also saw the completion of another fifty-two Daylami warriors to provide an additional thirteen elements to the thirty-three previously completed, just in case I ever need to field the maximum:

With the Arabs all now finalised I have commenced work on my remaining 15mm Forged in Battle army in the form of some 15mm Dark Ages Welsh, which I hope to complete over the next couple of months.