Battle of Barnet

   I was on a site visit in Luton last week and had the brilliant idea to stop and have my lunch at the monument to the battle of Barnet on my way home. With a lot of my thoughts at the moment being War of the Roses related, this felt like the right choice to make and sitting on the bench in the shade with a sandwich and a view of the monument, didn't change that view.

   Weirdly, considering its on a triangle of grass with a bus stop at one end, surrounded by housing and two busy roads, it was really peaceful. I think a lot of the evidence points to the battle taking place at a slightly different site, but it doesn't take away from this place.

Right, back to painting - except my dry brushes are drying before they touch the figure.

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WotR Mounted Peasants

   In what I'm going to start calling Cav-uly because I know what my painting queue looks like, the next units to be finished are a couple of units I said I probably wouldn't be buying for a while, light cavalry for my Lancastrian War of the Roses force - namely a unit of Sowrers and a unit of mounted archers. One of each so I could see how they were on the board, but they might be a useful basis for an ambush game in the future*.

*and there is no guarantee I won't buy another box before the game anyway

   As you might be able to tell, I painted the horses in the same batches I painted the middle eastern horses from the last post, and then the next post or few (also cavalry) were then mixed in as well. I also added another one of the metal mounted men at arms I had in my back pile, because by the time you are painting 36 cavalry from various projects, what is one more?

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Moorish Light Cavalry

   With my big time sensitive projects out of the way and some more wagons moving it feels like the right time to look back at projects that got half way to being usable but weren't quite finished for one reason or another. A prime candidate is my Moorish/Arabic army. 

   I finished the regular foot infantry a couple of years ago, which just left a few units of light cavalry and a unit of Black Guard. As it was the cavalry that were the real stumbling block, I spent a couple of days just building figures before I started painting in mixed batches, starting with batches of horses* before mixing them all back in and then randomly picking models out to paint the riders - all in an attempt to stop every dun coloured horse having guys in yellow robes and every flaxen chestnut having white robes etc.

*which included horses from another project

   Essentially, the riders are painted the same as the regular infantry but as they are likely to be slightly better off I've tried to add slightly more patterns to their robes or horse blankets but sticking to my bright colours theme I started with the infantry.

   There are 4 units in this finished batch - in Lion Rampant terminology there are; 2 units of mounted yeomen (mounted archers) and two units of mounted serjeants with bows (spear and shield units with quivers on the horse). This makes for a very mobile army that should give a crusader force a real problem if they can't get into range to hit something.

   As mentioned before I mixed in horses from another couple of cavalry units as I painted these, and I've then added more cavalry from even more units into later horse batches, so we are fast heading towards an accidental Cav-uly.

   Also, this project has definitely suffered from serious project creep over the last week. You have been warned. . .

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Special Delivery?

   These three wagons are from a couple of different companies, the 4 ox drawn wagon is from Perry Miniatures, while the other two are from Front Rank.

   Again, like the last wagons I've made a conscious effort to fill them up with things that either an army might need on their travelling or stuff that might be going to market and the armies that they will share the board with are coincidental. The loads are from 3 or 4 different sources by my reckoning, although I couldn't name most of them - I tend to add anything that looks interesting like these onto the back of orders for other stuff.

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Delivery!

   I've been spending a bit of time on my hobby spreadsheet since starting my new role as it seemed like a perfect time to really sit back and take stock as I'm not gaming every week and painting had slowed right down. One of the things I noticed is how many wagons there are on the list - I suspect from my every army needs some baggage aim in 2020. So, I decided as a nice mini project over the next few months or so, I would spend some time digging out as many of the wagon kits as I could and get them off the painting queue.

   I've gone through my backlog and dug out the vast bulk of my wagons, most* are now built and sprayed, so now it's just a case of painting them in batches.

*I ran out of space on my shelf to add more

   First up are the nominally dark age wagons. It's two packs of Gripping Beast's wagons - so a pair of handcarts and a pair of small horse drawn wagons. The one big thing I have done with these that I plan to do going forward is actually filling the back of the wagon up, it sounds like such an obvious detail but a fair few of my earlier baggage trains aren't actually carrying anything. 

   For these I put an important box on one hand cart - maybe a relic or the army's pay(?), the second has some axes, while one of the wagons is full of apples and the other is a mix of pots and crates.

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War Of The Roses - Panic Edition

   With about a week to go on the War of the Roses project to go, my mate Neil mentioned that he'd like to see me have a unit of mounted troops on the table. Ok, I replied, I did own a box of mounted men at arms, but I wasn't going to promise anything.

   So I got on with my last* planned unit of archers** but the thought about knights kept niggling at me and before I knew it I had a unit of the Perry plastics built and ready for spraying, along with a metal one that I'm not 100% when I bought but that would make a good character. I wasn't sure if I'd get them done, but quite frankly if they aren't built then they definitely can't get painted.

*which turned into two

**for the game

   It turned out I did get them done . . .

   Then over the weekend we were comparing what we had to be able to plan the game properly and Neil listed what he had and I realised I was another unit of archers short, so between jobs I dug out the very last archers I'd built and sprayed last year*** and started panic painting. Below are my last two units of archers - when I put them on the board I used all of the white and green liveried ones as regular archers and everything else as tenant archers.

***which made this project a lot quicker

I can't count this as a finished project as I know how much I have left to do, but it's good to see the project at a playable level.

It ended up being a really fun game, so glad I put the effort into getting them done***.

***Not that you can see much of my painting in this photo

   Now do I need some light cavalry for this army? And maybe some European mercenaries? Or do I look at getting my Yorkists moving?

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