Just Add Water: February 2023

The painting done thus far for 2022-2023 The Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge thus far has been dominated by my Thematic Byzantine army. I have punctuated these posts with Arthurian Welsh, Almoravid/Almohad/Andalusian Command Base and Anglo Danish Command Bases as seen below. Apologies for the lack of a link for the Spanish 11th CE stuff.

The change in project and indeed tempo is very welcome after feverishly working away at large Byzantine units every night of the week, often up until silly hours. As well as the change in pace I think the change has been a good distraction and has allowed for me to then push a little harder with the main project, that of the Thematic/Tagmatic 10th Century Byzantine army. There are probably two large posts due soon- all dependent on the weather for varnishing, but, until then I leave you with the Anglo Danish Command Bases which have been added to my army. Each 24 man unit now has a vignette style command stand.

All the images are "clickable" should you wish to enlarge them

Command Base 1:

Command Base 2:

Command Base 3:

Many years ago, under the influence by two exceptional painters and modellers at the Edinburgh Club, South East Scotland Wargamer Club (SESWC), after much study of their work I came to realise that the secret to creating interesting dynamic looking units was to go for as much variation and dynamism as possible and to limit in as much is possible, the repetitiveness of the miniatures! I won't jump too deep into that concept except to throw in a few pictures below.....

Anyway, with that in mind, as I started to clean up these Varangian Guards and ordered some extra sword and axe hands from Gripping Beast. With a quick-ish hand swap, I think these have reduced the level of homogeneity in the unit to make each miniature more interesting and the unit feel more "alive".

The Anglo Danish unit below is a nice example of how I strive for variation and to create as much dialogue between the miniatures as is possible with my toys. To have the miniatures "talk" to one another. There are many manufacturers in the unit which at first glance oat the list one might not think would necessarily fit together; Wargames Foundry, Footsore Miniatures (Matthew Bickley), Footsore Miniatures (Bill Thornhill), Gripping Beast, and Long OOP Gripping Beast so the variation was easy enough to create by using the various manufacturers. This was not the case with my Varangian Guard units where all the miniatures were from Gripping Beast's Thematic Byzantine range ergo the variation in weapons option.