Spanish Civil War Figures for Nick and Christopher

During our last Painting Challenge I had a fun brush duel with Nick, Christopher and Phil to see who could paint the most points of Spanish Civil War figures. I really thought I had it in the bag by establishing an early lead, but Nick took the prize in the last few weeks with a tremendous entry which, try as I might, I couldn't manage an effective riposte. Well done Nick!

So, here I present my tribute figure to Nick for his well-fought win: a Republican dinamiteros preparing to throw his pipebomb IED. 

This figure is from the excellent Empress range. 

I'm also sending along a LMG team as a belated reply to our Annual Friendly Figure Swap.

These guys are from Wargames Foundry's French partisan range which I think work very nicely for Republicans. If you squint a little, the Bren becomes a period appropriate Czech ZB vz 26. :)

AND for Chris, a Canadian standard bearer from the 15th International Brigade for being such a great supporter of the Challenge all these years.

Again, another Empress figure. He's carrying the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion colours

I'll be following up with a figure for Phil in a few weeks. That one I plan to hand-deliver later this autumn when we visit Crisis in Antwerp (SO excited). Now, how's that for service!

Next Up: An AAR from our '43 Italian campaign

Epic 30K Mechanicum Ordinatus Sagittar and Ulator (or, 'For heaven's sake man, speak English!')

One of the many cool things about Epic 30K/40K is that you can field groups of models that would normally be grossly be out-of-scale, if not entirely out-of-budget in 28mm. 

In Epic's 1/300 scale, one can have squadrons of huge super-heavy tanks, detachments of hulking siege automata and of course entire maniples of the enormous god-machine Titans, and all with a tabletop relationship between formations that meshes wonderfully, providing a terrific looking game. As an added bonus, a collector can indulge in a wide assortment of tiny 'ginormous' vehicles without taking out a second mortgage or having to find a family lawyer. 

Accordingly, here are two additions to my Epic 30K Mechanicum force, a pair of Ordinatus super-heavy weapons platforms: the Sagittar, armed with the shyly named Volcano Cannon and the Ulator sporting a 'it goes to 11' Sonic Destructor.  Suitably silly, but tremendous good fun.

My good friend Greg likes to call these 'compensator cannons' due to the ridiculous size of their armament, and so, along the same vein, I've named them 'Peter' and 'Ron'. :o)

As you can imagine, the game effect of these weapons is pretty ridiculous. Basically when these things power-up, the lights in the surrounding planetary sector dim and the gunners prepare to be swapped out for a fresh crew that has functioning vision and hearing. 

The funny thing is that these two are the SMALLER class of Ordinatus(!), with the REALLY big ones being kept in reserve when things get 'a little more serious' (like an impending Imperial audit, or something). Yes, like I said, it's kinda silly.

To give you a sense of the scale of these fellas, in this last image you see both Ordinatus next to a Krios Venator tank and a group of human-sized tech-thralls. Compensator Cannons indeed.

Next Up: A few lads from the Spanish Civil War 

Italian Wars Swiss Pike from Bern, Appenzell and Solothurn

Yooray! Another unit added to my Italian Wars collection. This time out we have a mob of Swiss pikemen from the cantons of Bern, Appenzell and Solothurn. 

The majority of figures from this unit were commissioned from the very talented John over at Jacksarge Brushes & Battles. 

Usually I prefer to paint my own figures, but I wanted to get this collection to a playable state sooner rather than later, so I've enlisted some help from a few pals from around the globe to assist me in getting them done.  I've already blogged about Brendon's Spanish jinete light cavalry and Chris' Lucerne pike; well, later this year you will see some work from two other paint condottiere whom I'm very happy to have as friends. I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag until they're all done and based-up - so more on that later.

As I enjoy doing the composition, banners and basework, I had John focus on painting the figures and I'd take care of the rest.

I actually received these figures around a year ago, but the Painting Challenge and other projects sidelined me from getting them properly based-up until this summer.

As you can clearly see John does beautiful work. I'm very, very pleased with them. 

These figures are Perry Dave Andrews sculpts from Wargames Foundry. While they are a little long-in-the-tooth I find that they are really lovely castings; nicely proportioned and conveying a wonderful sense of movement. 

To be honest after my Landsknecht pike I wasn't really keen on doing another formation in a charging pose as they are complete swine to base and take up about twice the space as a regular unit, but I couldn't help myself when I came across these models while browsing the WF catalogue. Oh well, I reason that these levelled-pike units can be used to denote veteran or particularly large-sized units so I'm okay with having a few in the collection. 

I painted up a few more models to help round-out the unit. There's a standard bearer buried in there that's mine, the horn player, the mounted hauptmann overseeing the lads and the poor landsknecht out in front, having a little lay-down.

The banners are from Pete's Flags

In this last shot you see the pikeblock being screened by a unit of Bernese halberdiers and led-in by their mascot, 'Daisy'.

Next Up: A couple of Big Guns for the Mechanicus.