Sunday, August 29, 2010

Norman Army for DBA... In 15mm

For a local gaming campaign with the DBA group here in town, I painted up a West Frankish/Norman army in 15mm. This was my first foray into painting 15mm, and it wasn't as bad as I thought. Generally I've disliked 15mm because of the poor proportions, but the Essex miniatures I have are not too bad, especially the knights.

Here is a shot of the whole army with all options.

Here are a couple of closeups of the general element:
The general is a knight element, so the figures are armoured similarly to the other knights.

Here are all the knights together, the main striking power of the army.
Some closeups of the knights:
Note the charging horsemen with the round shields in the top picture. These guys have older and poorer equipment, but they are charging like knights and in fact they must be knights to fill up the needed knight slots for this DBA army, so I'm assuming they're poorer relations. :)

Here are the less glamourous cavalry and light horse, but important nevertheless.
Some closeups of the cavalry:
I really like Essex's sculpts here. They have a lot of detail, although the faces are rather caricatured, something that seems unavoidable in metals, especially 15mm. Note the round-shield armoured guys, even poorer relatives of the round-shield knights from above?

Now for the less socially important (but not in the game) components of the army, the foot soldiers:
Unfortunately the archers and crossbow psiloi turned out rather blurry. They're actually very nice looking models, however the foot soldiers seem to have much worse proportions (big-headitis) than the cavalrymen.

The campaign is coming up soon, so I'll see how well a knight-heavy army will do. It helps that most of the opposition are blades or warband. :)

2 comments:

  1. Nice stuff; the bit of sheen adds some lovely highlight. I look forward to wandering among their corpses and admiring it close up... :)

    Bob

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  2. When will we see the Byzantines?

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