Paul's Border Princes - Month One (290 points)

And..... I'm spent. Maybe now I can sleep better without feeling like I need to get up and apply ink washes to nearly 30 minis at 4 am...

I felt I needed to achieve two things with my first month's entry. 1) Settle on the core colour scheme for the army 2) Get a big batch of the monopose plastics out of the way. The missile troops rather selected themselves as I get a bit of variation in painting the uniforms and it will be a big block of troops under my belt.

It took some deliberation to settle on the colour scheme. Initially I considered having my human contingent in the tan leather and canvas green of the militia of Felmoor in my ongoing D&D campaign, but that was just a bit too dull for the OWAC and I didn't want my Halflings and Dwarves having to pick up those colours to keep consistency with the army overall. In the end I went for the entirely unadventurous Dark Red and Cream (with mid brown leather work and dark wood for contrast) as this is both utilitarian in terms of the models being used in lots of different games, and having a slightly historical/crusader type feel to it which will fit the army theme better. I do paint a lot of red though so part of me thinks I should have chosen something else.

I call this colour palette 'Ham and Tomato on Rye'

Ah well - the die is cast now and I'm not unhappy with the resulting colour scheme. The most important thing is that they are getting painted! :D

But then almost immediately I changed my army list, even if only slightly. I decided I only wanted two units of 10 rather than three units of 7 archers. This was partly influenced by finding/remembering that one of the archers was missing his helmet plume so looks like the odd one out, and partly as it would mean only needing to do two variations on the colour scheme for the archers uniforms rather than three.

A minor set back, but worth doing

However, that meant I needed to rebase three archers so they were in the same alignment as their fellows so out came the clippers and back on the work bench they went. These Battle Masters plastics are never going to be amazing looking models but they should at least all be facing the right way in battle ;)

10 Archers #1

10 Archers #2

Nine Crossbowmen

Here is the tally for month one:

10 Archers (with Light Armour, Longbows, Hand Weapons) - 100 pts

10 Archers (with Light Armour, Longbows, Hand Weapons) - 100 pts

9 Crossbowmen (with Light Armour, Crossbows, Hand Weapons) - 90 pts

Month One Total - 290 pts.

Things I have learnt this month. BM plastics do have their charm, but as is obvious from some of these photos they also have some horrendous mould lines and slippage issues at times. The other thing I found is that the plastic they are made from really doesn't like paint, and the (different) white primer both I, and whoever owned half this bunch before me, used doesn't like it either. I found myself constantly having to touch up the bows in particular as the brown was rubbing off back to the white. People often say you can't polish a turd. I'll say you can but it takes an awful lot of gloss varnish.

Did someone say stretch goals!?

I also managed to get one small piece of scenery done as a stretch goal after it was suggested on the fb group. This is one of those pewter souvenir pieces from a museum stuck on top of a plaster cake column but it will do nicely as a campaign trophy being used as a road side mile stone.

I'm absolutely, positively sure I won't need to buy any more minis for this OWAC now...

Finally, in true OWAC style I have made another change to my starting list and purchased a Grand Master of the Knight's Panther to act as my army General - the renegade Knight mentioned in my opening post as ruling the area of the Border Princes these sorry sons of dogs are from.

Huzzah! Onward to month two!