A Brush with Macedonians

In the past week or so I have been able to devote a little  time to painting figures, in particular my 1/72 scale Macedonians. These will make up a DBA 'army'  as a try-out for the Alexandrian period. I'm quite cheered by my progress, though I won't win any prizes for either speed or quality! 

I started with the cavalry, and have completed these :

Alexander's strike force ( if he played DBA )

 

In DBA terms, one stand each of Companions ( Kn) , Thessalian (Cv ) and Greek Allied (Cv) Cavalry. My first attempt at painting ancients since Airfix Ancient  Britains and Romans in  the 1970s  ( I think I still have the Brits, based for WRG 6th Edition, lurking in the loft somewhere), it's been an interesting experience. I thought the small numbers of each type would make things easy and quick  - but I have  realised that of course, most of the time is taken up with researching and thinking about how to paint them, and then while actually painting,  it's quite annoying mixing some paint and then only applying it to three figures!   Once you've set up and got a brush loaded, you might as well be doing  a dozen or more.. 

On the upside, I like the colour schemes, though I admit my version of  Macedonian purple may be a little stronger and brighter than Ancient dye-makers could have come up with!  The 'research' side is interesting too, in that there is really quite scarce  information to work with when it comes to 'uniform' details - where would we be without the Alexander Sarcophagus and the Pompeii mosiac? I relied mainly on  Osprey's The Army of Alexander the Great ( MAA 148 ) by Nick Sekunda and Angus McBride, which takes a quite rigourous evidence-based approach, and Peter Connolly's Greece and Rome at War  - but of course everyone is working from pretty limited evidence.  It's not like the 18th Century/Napoleonic period, where detailed descriptions and illustrations are available for any and every uniform, and I rather like that, it means everyone can make their own interpretation and use their own style.  No-one can really tell you how you got a detail wrong - they can't prove it! It reminds me of  ECW/30YW armies, which have a similar feel of non-uniformity and freedom to interpret. So these are my interpretation - let's hope Alexander isn't rotating too fast in his grave, wherever that may be. I've kept it very simple and within my limited skillset - block painting, with  a touch of Army Painter 'Light Tone' ( probably could have been stronger ) and a coat of matt acrylic varnish for protection.  Beginner level I know, but they will be fine on the DBA battlefield, I'm sure.  I did even manage to give a couple of them leopard-skin saddle-cloths, and was quite pleased with the (strictly impressionistic) results.  

Making a start on Phalangites

 

Encouraged by those results,  I've moved on to the Alexandrian 'signature dish' (!) - the Pike Phalanx. In DBA terms this is 4 bases each of 4 Phalangites ( Pk), so at least this time I have a decent batch of 16 figures to work with! On a rare sunny outdoor afternoon I made a start by giving them scarlet tunics - I really like the colour,  not sure why I have been avoiding the British in my Seven Years War armies.. Inspiration for this is a splendid picture in Peter Connolly's book, which highlights the many possible  variations in armour ( both metal and cloth spolas ), helmets etc. The HaT Phalangites are very nicely modelled and easy to paint - and maybe I'm gettimg my eye in a bit.

The Companions and the Thessalians are sporting the rather impressive 12-foot long xyston cavalry spear, and the Phalangites will of course brandish their even longer ( up to 18 feet ) sarissa pikes - HaT quite wisely don't try to model these, so how to proceed?   I remembered an idea which I think came from Graham Evans aka 'Trebian'  on his excellent Wargaming for Grown-Ups blog : so I went to a local hardware store, and equipped myself with this: 

Bristling with ideas..

 

Yep, a good ol' household brush,  with tough plastic bristles - I had to measure it carefully before buying, though, to make sure they were at least 3 inches (  18 feet in 1:72 scale ) long! They have worked admirably, they even fitted perfectly in the pre-moulded holes in the HaT figures' hands. Of course they may suffer from paint-shedding if handled too roughly, but I'm going to try a final coat of  clear PVA glue just on the spears and pikes to stiffen them up a bit. Fingers crossed!

Now I just have to keep up the routine of 'painting hour' to push on with these - after the Phalangites there are bases of Prodromoi Light Cavalry, Thracian Peltasts / Hypaspists , Greek Hoplites, Javelin men and Archers. Maybe I can put them into larger batches when it comes to applying common colours, to speed things up.  And then there's the Persians, which should be really interesting, madly colourful, and are probably even less well-documented! 

More figures next time, I think - I have made an interesting 'old school' purchase, but I've rambled on long enough for now. And I feel a 7YW Portable Wargame battle coming on.. So until then; keep well, everyone.                               

The lure of Malta, and Spencer-Smith Saxons - finally

 I really must get back to a spot of painting, and maybe even gaming..was the sign-off to my last post here. Well, one out of two isn't bad.. I did manage to get behind a paintbrush or two this past week, of which more later. But I also got slightly led astray.. You see, as a child in the grip of an obsession with aeroplanes ( thanks to Capt. W.E, Johns, of course )  I picked up a little paperback book that made a huge impression.- Faith, Hope and Charity by Kenneth Poolman. Here is that very volume, which I have hung on to all these years: 

 

The story of the famous trio ( actually, maybe  there were four of them )  of Gloster Gladiators and the heroic defense of Malta from Italian and German air attacks from 1940 to 1942 ( it was the most heavily-bombed place on earth )  just grabbed my imagination, and I have never really forgotten it.  Several more books on the subject have joined my bookshelves since - I can recommned James Holland's Fortress Malta  as a really good modern telling of the story, with lots of eyewitness accounts. I also made it to Malta once, just on a ordinary package  holiday, but I remember managing to drag my friends to the museum in Valetta to look at the semi-restored airframe of the last survivor of those Gladiators - 'Faith'.  And then last week The Naval and Military Press came up with one of their special offers - 25% off WW2 books, in this case  - and I found something of a bargain. This is Fighters Over Malta: Gladiators and Hurricanes 1940-42  by Brian Cull and Frederick Galea, published in 2018. by Fonthill.  

 Now Mr. Cull has form in this area, with a string of books relating to wartime events on Malta to his name, ( many years ago I picked-up his earlier  'Malta: the Hurricane Years' and was pretty much amazed that someone had researched in such detail )  and Frederick Galea is a Maltese native and aviation writer, who is also hon. secretary of Malta's National War Museum Association, so we are in the hands of experts.  They have produced something of a doorstop of a volume, almost 500 pages ( in a small typeface too!) , covering the operations of Gladiator and Hurricane fighters defending Malta from June 1940 to April 1942. The text includes a very high proportion of extracts from personal diaries and journals written by those taking part, and I think that, combined with Brian Cull's mastery of the detailed history,  will make it especially interesting. You've got to salute a book that includes, among nine appendices, one that simply lists the serial numbers of all the known Hurricanes used on the island - I'm sure that will be extremely useful(!).   I am really very pleased with this book, now the only issue is the small matter of actually  reading it! I am thinking of a  'real-time' approach - given that the story is told strictly chronologically from  June 1940,  I hope to make a start now and read up to mid-July 1940, and then  every few days, read the account of the events of the same few days 83 years earlier. Only a few minutes each day ( or week ) should be  required - though of course I wouldn't then finish the whole book until April 2025!   Anyway, this is going to be something of a feast, I am very pleased to have acquired it. By the time I finish, I suspect there may be a companion volume on the Malta Spitfires..  I haven't really tried gaming this campaign,  though I do have the recent WW2 air combat boardgame Wing Leader, and I am pretty sure that has some Malta scenarios. Tally ho!

And the painting? Well, I am glad to say I finally finished painting a couple of Portable Wargame units of infantry, representing the  Friedrich August Regiment of the army of Saxony. These are the vintage Spencer-Smith figures gifted to me by Neil from the excellent Aufklarungsabteilung blog - I was really pleased to get them, but I will admit I struggled with painting them! A case of  'be careful what you wish for', perhaps?  I thought that their minimal detail would make them easier to paint, but in reality it seemed to be exactly the reverse, and I clearly didn't have the skills, steady hand or eyesight for the job.  I hit something of a 'wall' with these, but eventually managed to press on and finish them. Here they are - just don't look too closely!

                                                                      

I am still really very pleased to have these nice old figures in my armies, their distinctive pose is so evocative of the old-school games pictured in Charles Grant's The War Game .  I think I rather rushed into doing these, and I will need to think and plan a bit before doing the next batch, but I also think I learned some useful lessons which will help me do better in future. I think I need to do at least one, perhaps two  more eight-figure units for regiment Friedrich August, and I then hope to add another infantry regiment from Saxony, plus some cavalry.  In case you are wondering, the slightly wobbly black-lining was done with a fine-tipped pen from an art shop - luckily it proved to be waterproof when I gave them a coat of matt acrylic varnish - and I think the resulting delineation between colours,  especially the white and yellow in the uniforms, helped a bit. I hope  they won't fight any worse than other units when deployed on the table - and one advantage of mostly gaming solo is that no-one else is likely to get a very close look at them! 

Having more or less got back into a painting habit, I have also been picking at the first few of my HaT Alexandrian Macedonian figures - more of those later, if I can keep up the momentum. And surely some gaming must be in order: these Saxons need to take the field.  So,  watch this space, and until next time keep well, everyone. 

Fnurban #25 : A Load of Old Balls?

I've been to that there London, specifically to the Design Museum in Holland Park (the building  was formerly the Commonwealth Institute )  to see an exhibition :  Making Sense by Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei. 

I'll admit to not being very good at 'conceptual' art ( i.e. where they have to explain what it means ), but it was pretty interesting, even if only at the level of 'how are these pieces put together, how much effort goes into them, and how did he acquire 250,000 pieces of Lego?'. But one piece in particular intrigued me: this being  Untitled ( Porcelain Balls ).    I took some pictures, which I include here.

It was a pretty amazing sight - there are clearly many, many thousand of these objects in the piece (which measured probably 10 by 5 metres ). I think the smaller balls were maybe 2cm diameter, the larger ones about double that - perhaps 5cm / 2 inches ? It seems they are indeed made from porcelain, and the exhibition commentary  says the following :  

When Ai first encountered these balls, he had no idea what they were. It turned out that they are cannonballs made during the Song dynasty (960 – 1279 CE). There are more than 200,000 on display, making it hard to comprehend that they were hand-made.

 

That rather flabbergasted me;  the sheer numbers of them, the age of them, and the idea of using porcelain for this purpose.  From a brief internet search,  Wikipedia confirms that cannon were in use by the 13th Century in China, and even has an article on Gunpowder Weapons in the Song Dynasty   which is quite an eye-opener ( government factories were producing gunpowder in large quantities in the 11th Century!) but does not mention cannon balls being made of porcelain. 

I can only assume that the description is correct - I am certainly in no position to contradict it - and I simply remain rather 'gobsmacked', if you'll excuse my highly  intellectual language.  I might have to read more about Chinese military history; now where's that copy of Sun Tzu? 

I thought readers might be interested in this - if you want to go and see them, the exhibition continues until 30th July. 

I really must get back to a spot of painting,  and maybe even gaming; meanwhile keep well, everyone.