Stourbridge & District Wargamers

Being by nature something of a idle painter with a short attention span and a megalomanical bent towards micro-scale and Grand Tactical rulesets it was fairly inevitable that I'd evantually end up at the 2mm block end of things.

The following figures are all from Irregular Minatures extensive range of 2mm Renaissance castings with a few bits and pieces from their Horse and Musket range. Despite my not-very-brilliant photographic skills I hope this shows that they aren't just rounded blobs and can easily be painted to give an nice impression of scale and mass.

The figures themselves are a piece of cake to paint, just prime them black then use dampbrushing to hint at the colours. For example, for the large pike blocks on the Tercio bases, the pike hafts were drybrushed over black, then the tops (the pike blades) were drybrushed silver. The "uniform" colours are dampbrushed around the edges of the block, faces (where visible) dotted in with flesh and a random mix of browns and greys used to dot in the hats and headgear of the troops. Taking some time over the basework "sets" the models in a realistic terrain and this is perhaps the most important part of painting the blocks up.

When groundworking, I find it best to flock the entire base [i]before[/i] adding the castings. This is back-to-front in the normal scheme of things but if you add the casting and then flock, the flock seems too high and the little men look like pygmies wading through waist-high grasslands.

Infantry Battalia

These are actually Irregular's Tercio block but I found them too small for my purposes (my purposes being Principles of War Renaissance played with half-measurements - so that a Tercio base occupies a 45mm x 45mm footprint) so they got re-used as Infantry Battalia. You can see here how important dotting in the faces is, also you can see how the castings are mounted on top of the flock, rather than amidst it. In the background is a 6mm scale General and a 2mm scale Chateau.

Infantry Battalia & Artillery

These are the original bases I did to represent Infantry battalions. I think the intention of Irregular is that you use one of the castings as a single battalion, but something I learned when researching this period is that the single wargames unit of pike sleeved by shot is not historically accurate. In reality, regiments deployed in several bodies and were drilled to adjust the relative positions so there is no reason why a single regiment of foot shouldn't be represented as two or more bodies. Hence I use a single base of two castings as a single regiment. In the front (behind the batteries) is an attempt to represent Swedish triangular formation, in this case the Yellow Brigade.

The Tercio

As I mentioned above the Irregular Tercio castings aren't big enough for me. These are though! These are made from four pike blocks and four horse and musket blocks. Irregular do two types of "standalone" pike block, one of which has the pikes swept forwards with wind-swept flags and the other with the pikes upright. I much prefer the former and have used them here. With hindsight, I think that larger blocks of muskeeters would have improved the look of these bases.

Horse