Countdown to Salute

No pictures today. Sorry. We are also too busy to blog regularly at the moment, because we are desperately trying to finish off the last of the figures and terrain so that the game will be displayed in full form at Salute. Eek! Why am I blogging when I should be painting?

Anyway, we hope to meet you all there or at Triples in May and we hope you enjoy our game.

More Lancastrians join the fray

This month we have mostly been building terrain for the Towton refight. My target for painting was to add two more contingents to the Lancastrian army, which I have done after a fashion. I did not paint them all myself though. Peter at Baccus kindly lent me his Warmaster Ancients army on condition that I rebased it to the 60mm x 30mm standard bases that he favours. The army was on 40mm x 20mm bases before. So, rather than spending the whole month painting, I have spent a large part of it rebasing stuff. This has actually put me ahead of schedule as I now only need to paint ten more stands to have a complete single iteration of the Lancastrian order of battle, once Steve finishes the contingent he is painting for me. With this done we should be ready to rock at Salute. I shall then get the rest of the figures I was meant to paint myself done so that we can add some extra figures to the battle when we attend Derby in October.

The Yorkist army has also benefitted from Peter's kindness to the tune of one contingent, but I forgot to photograph them when I took these other shots. This leaves just twelve stands of troops remaining for the Yorkist army. Those are currently in the capable hands of my friend John, who has promised them soon.

In addition to these figures, I have included a teaser shot of the Towton terrain at the bottom of this post. As usual click the pics for a larger version.

Here we see the whole Lancastrian command that I am working on(empty bases show what remains to be painted):


This is what I have painted this month:


And here we have some of the figures that I rebased for Peter:


Proto-Towton terrain (everything you need to build Towton properly):

January Update

Here is what I painted in January instead of doing anything useful (like my thesis)!

Parts of Exeter's Command slog their way across Towton Dale towards the Yorkist lines. Baccus 6mm figures as usual with a sneak preview of part of the Towton terrain included. Flags are all by Freezywater and bases from East Riding Miniatures.

Starting the terrain

Last night, Steve and I began building the terrain for this project. At present it looks like a mess of EPS, newspaper and various odds and ends of rubbish that were lying around the house looking useful. If you are interested, the basic building materials are:

9mm MDF for the baseboards;
EPS for the frames and basic contours;
Any old offcuts of EPS and expanded polystyrene for building up the interior of each board;
Newspaper and various bits from my paper and cardboard recycling bins for building up the contours further;
Some of my older t-shirts that my wife thinks are past their best;
Plaster; and
Sand.

This should give us terrain boards based on the contours on the OS map. We then just have to paint it and add flock to make it look like an English field on a cold day with a scattering of snow on it. The question remains whether we should attempt to simulate the snow by rigging up a snow dispenser over the table too!

There are no photos of beautiful finished terrain yet, but you can expect to see an 18' by 4' (that's 5.4m by 1.2m) table made of recycled rubbish at Salute, which will be our first outing. I plan to give Peter at Baccus a detailed terrain-building description with photos for his site when it is done and also to post some photos of the finished product here, but in the meantime I'm afraid that you will have to use your imaginations. Sorry.

Nano-Towton

No time to refight the battle with 20000 or more figures? Not enough space? You need new, improved Nano-Towton(tm)! Nano-Towton uses amazing miniaturised technology to permit you to refight the battle of Towton in an area as small as 2' x 2' (600mm x 600mm). Want to know how to do it? Download the orders of battle and special rules here. You will also need the Basic Impetus rules, which are freely downloadable here.

The idea is that you can have some semblance of a refight using armies of only around ten stands each in a short space of time. I chose to do this with Basic Impetus because they are free and I prefer them to DBA.

Warwick's Completed Contingent

Well I've finally finished Lord Ogle and Sir Thomas St.Leger's contingents.
So here is the finished battle.

Cheers

Steve

Progress So Far

This is where I'm up to with my second command, Warwick's

Hopefully I should soon have those final 8 levy stands sorted out. Then it's crack on with terrain, so nothing much then.

Cheers

Steve S