Peasants and Pilgrims

For Billington Moor (see earlier posts) I am going to need to represent the less well equipped Great Fyrd.  ADLG counts these as levy and DBA 3.0 as solid horde (7Hd).  Now hordes or levy crop up in a number of army lists in both sets of rules so I decided that some generic units of ill armed peasant types would give me the flexibility to use any thing I created in a number of different armies.

Baccus is my preferred figures range but the nearest they have for representing what I wanted were clubmen from their 17th century range.  So I went with Irregular’s Peasants and pilgrims from their medieval range.  These are noticeable smaller than Baccus but using a slightly thicker base would help disguise that.  I also wanted to have some figures representing slightly better equipped troops in the front ranks.  So off went an order to Irregular for the peasants and pilgrims along with some Viking spearmen.  I also took the opportunity to order some laser cut 2mm PDF bases from Warbases which would give me a thicker base than my usual 1.5mm plywood bases.

Ordering was easy Irregular now having a proper online ordering and payment system which is much easier to use than the old system.  Both orders came within a couple of days, well packed and with no damage.  The laser cut bases were a bit of a revelation to me as I have always cut my own using a straight edge and a Stanley knife.  Because these are laser cut there is no variation, all totally accurate. I’m a convert.  Next time I will try the 1.5mm plywood option.  The figures were less impressive but acceptable for what I wanted.  There was a fair amount of flash between the figures on all of the peasant castings.  The Vikings were much better but compared to Baccus the casting detail is much less well realised.  Still these are figures from an earlier generation of sculpting styles so differences in quality are to be expected. It was nothing that a couple of hours with some micro files and modelling tools couldn’t deal with.

Ready for priming.  There is detail there just in low relief.

Unlike Baccus who cast figures as strips with space between each figure Irregular has three styles of castings  based on old WRG base width requirements.  Close order castings  are shoulder to shoulder 6 figures wide.  These can’t be separated into smaller groups unlike the open and loose order blocks which have some gaps.  Both castings I had chosen were loose order so out came the side cutters to break the castings down into the smaller groups I needed.  I wanted to have a frontage of 8 figures per rank so groups of four and of two were the order of the day.

Painting makes a huge difference to Irregular’s 6mm figures.  The detail is there but it is often surface detail with little depth so careful painting is vital to pick this out.  The thing about Irregular's 6mm figures is that initially they look a bit like vaguely man shaped blocks but after painting they look fine.  I tried a different undercoating technique for these, using a coat of Vallejo ‘Earth’. I wanted these troops to be less colourful so I used a range of muted earthy shades with the odd bit of colour on headgear to make the figures show as individuals.

I will let you judge if the final result passes muster.  Only another 144 figures to make the remaining 6 elements to do then.