To recap....
Some of my historic friends recently got into a skirmish game called SAGA.... I told them I would give it a go.... this was almost 8 months ago. Needless to say, SAGA is actually a pretty decent game. It is a skirmish game that uses it's own unique dice and those dice drive something called the "ability" board. I won't get into explaining the rules other than to say.. I have not played an official game yet, but I have gone over the rules many times. It is a unique game and I hope it will play as fun as it seems.
I bought the Milites Christi faction.. which belongs to the "Crusades" version of the game.... Currently there are a few setting to buy, build and play your forces.... Viking era, Crusades era, Age of Arthur and now a fantasy one too (just recently released). I do not think the warbands over lap at all, but... the Christi faction can be used as Normans as they are composed of pretty much the same forces.
I have been working on these on and off for some time.... I have loads of other projects I can post about and need to! As I mentioned, I do not like paining against white.....
I bought a SAGA 4 point army starter box. It has a general, 8 mounted knights, 8 warriors on foot and 8 crossbow men. The models are all lead with plastic bases. I like the flat round ones as they do not detract form the models when they are finished.
The models were easy to assemble. As for flashing, that varied.... most were cast very well, but there were a few that had a lot of mold line issues and flash to clean up. I glued them together once cleaned up and then primed white. I wanted my white, when I painted it to be bright enough.... I hate how hard it is to sometimes paint a light color on top of a dark primer.
The figures were then based in the small Games Workshop gravel... this paints up nicely as rubble or rough ground. It all depends if you add grass or other scenic material. I was going for the appearance of rough ground. Not quite sand and not quite lush land.... more of a badlands look in an arid climate. I chose 2 GW tan colors. They used to be called different leathers... now the one has a number for a name and I forget the other... we shall say tan and desert tan as the highlight.
The color pallets for the warriors was rather simple... black, white, dark brown for the jerkin color with a lighter brown highlight. The armor was of course IWM steel. Any gold type accents were actually painted IWM bronze. The flesh color was a mix of a light tan base as I figured these guys were in the desert for a while with some IWM flesh as a highlight. I still am not painting eyes...
I used a lot of drybrushing for highlights and no real shadow painting as I relied on the base color to create the shadows. Also, as you can see.. I started with painting the warriors on foot.
Above you can see the colors I used for painting them.
Here they are almost done... they still need sealed and the bases need their final touches (grass and highlights)
After the warriors were near completion, I moved to the crossbow men.. I thought these guys were going to go quicker as they were more fun to paint, but out of the gate, the royal blue for the gambeson was giving me issues. I actually started with him and then finished him last form the first group of 4. As these guys were not peasants or levy, but professional soldier... not knights, but professionals... I wanted them to have a varied look, but not simple peasant garb.
Lastly, I tackled the blue gambeson guy... with some work, it turned out pretty decent. It was hard to choose the right colors to make it work. That is the last time I try to "emulate" what is on the box art! In the end, I think the four of them turned out rather nice. The colors I used were almost all Vallejo. Below you can see them almost finished, grass tufts included... after I took this picture, I went back and cleaned up some of the painting... It is amazing what you miss and what gets revealed in a picture!!!
After this group was done, I took a little break and worked on some LotR dwarves.... yes, more on that later.
Above you can see the 8 warriors and 4 of the crossbow men. All done except shield bosses and sealing. I pretty quickly moved back to finishing up the last 4 crossbow men... I didn't think it was much of an issue, but the unit consisted of 8 guys... 2 of each pose... this is easily remedied by painting them different... as they are rank and file, it really wasn't a bother.. BUT.... if I had to paint too many of the same pose, my enthusiasm would have run dry.... such is the life of a rank and file trooper!
The last 3 crossbow men are in que to get done and are further along the picture indicates. I'll do a follow up of them all done when I start posting about the 8 mounted knights.
At Fall In! I managed to get the shield bosses and my next project... I'll be adding these when I am ready. the only bad thing is this... the packs are relatively cheap... ~$5... BUT.... you only get 12 decals per pack.... the starter army alone needs 16.... I didn't know this until I got home. The thing is... They are DESIGNED to fit Gripping Beast Miniatures.... you would think that they would know each box set requires 16 decals.... lesson learned. I'll have to pick more up later.
Milites Christi decals
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