Tuesday, June 15, 2010

New Miniatures & Work

In preparation for the next Wars of the Roses encounter, I have been both making and buying a few extras. First up, I decided to look into getting some banners made for the relevant nobles. The Perry Miniatures boxed sets come with free banners in the form of a randomly inserted sheet (I got four boxes - and four identical sets of banners for Bosworth, naturally!) Although they were no good for what I was searching out, I did get a size template from them. I drew it out onto a sheet of decent-quality paper and then got to drawing and painting myself! The results:

Excuse the temporary stands on some of them, but the banners here are Lancastrian (l-r) Audley, Buckingham, Beaumont, Wiltshire, Shrewsbury & Exeter.


Yorkists here, with (l-r) Ferrers, York, March, Powys & Salisbury. It turns out the details of heraldry such as lions rampant, fleur-de-lis, etc. are nightmarishly hard to draw, but nonetheless a shapeless squiggle with the right colour is indistinguishable on a tabletop (always abide by the 'two-foot rule'!) The banners were drawn twice as mirror-images, cut out, folded over along the 'staff' side, then lightly glued on. Beyond making things, I have also bought a small addition in the form of a cannon, or 'Gonne' from Perry Miniatures.


A free word of advice, Perry Miniatures! - If you send out an order for a miniature in a small package, please don't place the parts in a small jewellery-style box! Otherwise my wife collects the post before I get home, convinces herself that I've bought her a surprise piece of jewellery as a present, then I'm stuck with the task later on of explaining how 'a large Culverin on a Burgundian-style carriage with four crewmen' actually counts as a thoughtful gift ("but this is better than a necklace dear, it has a practical purpose!") Nice work guys, thanks a bunch...

2 comments:

  1. Craig,

    I think hand-drawn flags have a charm all their own. Yours look great!

    Did you use coloured markers or paint on the flags?

    Did you seal them with anything after painting? After I touch up my flags and let them dry for a day or two, I put on a thin coat of a mix of water and white glue.

    Nice job.

    Your royalty check from the Perry's should be in the mail. Thanks to following your WOTR project I finally ordered a box of plastic figures. Time will tell if I like assembling them or not. Have you mixed the plastic Perrys with any other ranges? I was thinking Old Glory or Front Rank?

    Jim

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Jim, thanks for the kind comments!

    I pencilled in the flags on some decent paper myself, painted them with my usual model-painting acrylics and a small brush, then I used a fine technical drawing pen to outline & border the coloured areas - an adjustment which I think 'made' the banners!

    Good luck with your own Perry collection! Personally I have only the Perry sets at the moment (although I was thinking of Front Rank for 'character' figures sometime in the future.) At the moment however the campaign is taking priority as I seem to have temporarily burned-out regarding painting!

    Cheers,
    Craig

    ReplyDelete