It's my honour to present to you, an actual proper unit.

 Well, it's been almost a year, (two weeks away actually) since last I did a proper full size 28mm unit, that was my British SYW grenadiers. Since then I've done some odds and ends, and these small scale skirmish things for Vietnam and WW2, and the Epic scale stuff, but they are so small they don't count.

But here I can now finally present you with a proper-sized 28mm unit. 

Drumroll, please...

A full-sized Spanish pike and shot formation, 39 figures, 15 pikemen and command, 24 arquebusiers, and musketeers. All 39 figures are unique, not a single duplicate. I started these like 18 months ago I think, did the pike center, and 1 base of arquebusiers, but then the arquebusiers fell on the floor and 4 figures fell off, weapons bent, and paint flaked off. I lost complete interest in continuing on them. But I decided to take them out and finish them, those that fell to the ground needed literally 15 minutes of work to fix. Yet it had held me back from finishing them. I then did the remaining 18 shot figures. 
The 1898 figures are lovely, my only complaint is the swords, they are kinda hard to make look good, as they are attached to some stuff from the molding process. and they don't sit very well on the belts when glued on. But the figures themself are excellent, good character without them becoming some grotesque parody of mid-17th-century soldiers. 

I still have enough pikes and command do to another pike base, but no more shot, I'll go take a look at how many avanpost musketeers I have, I might be able to use those, even tho I break half of them before they are finished painting. 

I kept to mostly brown vests/jacks, with mostly white shirts, some times I had a little colour, some of them look like they could be in cloth jacket, so I painted them with more colour, some arms are clearly jackets with cut arms, so there I again added colour with white shirt seen in the slashes. Trousers are anything from brown and beige to more colorful stuff. buff coats on the pikemen and some buff vests on the shot.

I still haven't found any clear concise info on just how a Spanish Tercio looked in the 1630s-1650s Most likely they were not these huge 2500-3000 man behemoths. But just how they deployed I do not know, if they still tried to use 4 sleaves on a pike block or if they more or less looked like the dutch system at this point. Just because it's called a tercio doesn't mean it actually looks like the original ones.
They were still called Tercios when they were 5 deep lines of just musketeers during the Spanish succession.

Anyway, I don't know what will show up on the blog next, maybe some more TYW, maybe some WW2. I really wanna get back to my SYW, but I don't know if I'll find the inspiration for it.

Italian Wars Men at Arms.

So I've done some more work on my Italian wars project. 

They are Perry 1450-1500 men at arms, that I've Italian-war-uped. The biggest part is the standard-bearer, I stole the idea from Stuart Mulligan and you can see his far better version here.

https://stuartsworkbench.blogspot.com/2017/09/french-cavalry-part-1.html 

So I green-stuffed the skirt and hat for him. I also decapitated some damaged foundry gendarmes and used to of the heads. These have a dual purpose. The flag is removable and the unit can be used as men at arms by themself, they can be Italian condottiere or Spanish men at arms. Or I can use some of them in my Ordinance Lace formations. My plan is for the Lance formations to consist of 4 Gendarmes, flanked by 4 men at arms and those again flanked by 4 archers. 

Getting these done was a pain in the ass, I got the flu at the start of the week, and wasn't really in shape to paint much, but I  did manage to finish the last 4(the first 4 I did months ago) Not that happy with a couple of the horses the colour I used was strange, with stuff in it. 

But worse it got when I attempted to do the basing. After doing the first layer of brown on all the bases, I got up, but being rather sick I was in my robe and the robe attached itself to 2 of the bases. One survived the fall, the other base lost both horses and one of the riders lost its head. So I had to glue that on again, and it stopped me from finishing the base yesterday. Today I see that one of the horses I glued yesterday is on crocked, so I had to remove it, and now glue it with superglue. Then as I finish the basing, another base falls to the floor. This time one of the lances fall out. So I have to glue that one on again too. And almost lost the lance in the attempt.  But they're done now. And I've put them in a safe place before they spontaneously combust.