Matchstick men and matchstick .....

......... horses and riders. Come on you didn't really think I was going to say cats and dogs did you? Although L S Lowry really did paint the street I grew up on a couple of years after I was born. It's not one of his greatest works and he took a bit of artistic licence with the look of the thing. However, I digress, you want to hear about my matchstick obsession not art criticism.

What I'm attempting to do is create something that doesn't look too naff next to the rather nice Irregular Miniatures 2mm cavalry.  My go to is the armoured pistolier casting of  15 troopers in three ranks from their renaissance range.   So far (after a couple of tries) I have the basic footprint pretty much as I want it compared to the casting.  The issue is getting the individual horses'  head and neck looking right as they are big enough to notice but small enough to be tricky to model in 2mm. 

You can clearly see horse heads and necks on these armoured pistoliers

You can see that its going to be a big ask to create something to compete with these little beauties.  It's hard to accept that each horse and rider has a footprint which is slightly smaller than a grain of rice!

Here you can see the wedge shapes depicting heads and necks

My mark one paper and matchstick effort really isn't cutting the mustard.  The horses need to go on a diet as their bodies are too wide and I still haven't added any riders or horse's heads plus over all these are too big.  

My non mustard cutting first stage.

So the next attempt saw the horse prints reduced in size (and starved of hay for a while) so they were closer in size to the Irregular Miniatures castings.  I also added a layer of card on top of the matchsticks to raise the overall height.  That looked a lot more like the idea I had in mind but still not much like the castings do.  I would have to make up rows of riders to glue along the rows of horses and then some teeny tiny heads.  Which sounds like a lot of time and effort to make something that isn't anything like as good as a cast block of horses.  So I'm going to call this a failure and look to see what is available to purchase.

In other news the infantry blocks are easy to make and don't look bad at all so I will be continuing with those.

First two Swedish brigades now with flags.

The Yellow Brigade has the lower pikes from the original test run while the Blue brigade has two layers of matchsticks forming the pikes.  That changes where I can place the (over sized) flags.  If I placed them on top of the Blue Brigade pike I think it would be too tall, hence the frontal placement, but I prefer the look of them sprouting from within the block.

Close up of one of the Yellow Brigade pike blocks

I think I need to add some stripes of light and dark to the pike to show some indication of individual pike shafts.   I'm wondering if I could do a printed skin for that as I have for the troops. 

Comparison of the two options for pike blocks

So what does the audience think one row in height or two rows?  Flags front or on top? Do the pike need something extra to suggest pike shafts and if so how should I attempt that?