Entry #4 to the 9th Lead Painters' League: 'Berne Baby Berne' - Swiss Mercenaries, 1476

My friend Peter and I were both bitten by the Italian Wars bug this past winter and so agreed to work together to get some miniatures done for the tabletop. 

For my first unit I thought I'd cut my teeth with some Swiss mercenaries as I reason that they could be used for any of the bewildering number of factions that fought during the period.

These figures represent halberdiers from the Swiss canton of Berne.

All of these figures are Perry metals from their rather vaguely titled 'European Armies' range. These are fantastic models with loads of animation and character. That being said, they did require a fair bit of prep work to get ready for painting (something I have less patience with especially when you pay a premium for the castings themselves and other manufacturers are now providing products that are virtually pristine out of the packaging). 

I decided to go with Berne for no other reason than I had this great pot of orange paint I wanted to try out and I knew the colour featured prominently in that canton's banners. Yup, rather lame, I know.

I chose to arm these guys with a variety of halberds and pole arms as I knew I'll probably use the boxed set of Perry plastics for the my future pike-armed figures. 

I based the models in groups of three on 40mm rounds as I wanted the ability to create quasi mini vignettes, and it also allows me to use them for a variety of rules systems depending on how I decide to mob them up.

For the unit's banner I scanned one provided in the Perry boxed set, printed it off on decent quality cotton paper, molded it to shape using diluted white glue and then repainted it using the same tones I used for the figures.

I often use this approach with my 'homemade' flags as I find that if the colour medium of the flag is the same as the figures (i.e. paint as opposed to laser-printed ink) then they somehow work better together. This is the same reason why I always paint my groundwork instead of leaving it as raw bits of stone, sand and talus. It's weird but it oddly jives with my whacky sensibilities.

I'll add a few more stands to beef up this unit and then try a group of pike and perhaps some Landschneckts. 

Thanks for dropping by!

Next up: Something both Simian and Steampunk...