Thursday 10 June 2021

First of the 'pike heavy' regiments of foot - Mellow Yellow!

Having painted six of the 2:1 ratio (muskets to pikes) units I'm moving onto to a few 'pike heavy or 1:1 ratio units. These will retain the same 120mm frontage but consist of 12 pikes and 12 muskets plus the command base. 

I fancied painting a unit wearing yellow coats and having referenced the list of coat colours in both armies on this blog to see if yellow was indeed a valid colour (Sir Marmaduke Rawdon's wear yellow coats in the Sealed Knot I recall), I set to. The coats are deep yellow over a shade colour of Japanese WW2 uniform, yep, the same as I use to highlight my horses. It's important when painting yellow uniforms not to end up with a bunch of bananas, so tried to keep it fairly muted and gave them lots of grey and brown breeches to break things up a little. Quite pleased with them overall but these will probably be my only yellow regiment. Next one will be another blue unit, same 1:1 ratio.

Peter Pig figures, just need a brush over to remove static grass!











14 comments:

  1. Why not give them a second flag to make the command group the same width as the pike block? That will make it really obvious which are the pike heavy units

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    1. Hi Rob, the standard bearers are the one thing I'm not totally happy with so far and I have been thinking about giving all command bases 2 flags! Martin at PP can provide packs of just the standard bearers at slightly additional cost and I think it could be well worth the effort. That said larger flags would also be an improvement but that would mean cutting off the pole at the top of the hands, drilling a small hole and inserting a longer rod. It's fiddly but could be done and would hugely increase the impact of the command bases, my flags just look undersized and in scale terms I think they are.

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    2. Another vote here from an oversized flag fan,I drill out and use thin wire to support the increased size.. so much more impact, and even bigger than scale they look good.. I also like that yellow - a difficult colour to get right, but you have in spades.. I am very tempted as a change from the endless blues and reds with occasional grey...!

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    3. Steve, I noticed you use larger flags and they do look better so I'm going to have a play with the drill later! Re the yellow, I did spend a fair bit of time trying to get it to look right, not too bright but still needed lots of grey and brown breeches to tone things down a bit.

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  2. These are particularly fine Lee. The yellow is exquisite and sets off the blackened armour brilliantly.
    Regards, James

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    1. Thanks James, I'm pleased how they turned out although at one point I almost repainted them!

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  3. Lovely looking yellow regiment, I like two flags for my ECW regiments, I went for one with my covenanters and regret it!
    Best Iain

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    1. Cheers Iain. I think I'll go with two flags, good thing is I only need to redo the command bases and not an entire unit base.

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  4. I think the colours are about right size-wise if you want to be in scale, but over-sized flags just look nicer. I say go for it!

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  5. Well you know how I feel about flags, 'Lee. Go on, you know you want to! Sorry, two!

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    1. I'm going to have two flags per command base but will stick with the smaller flags to avoid having to drill out already painted figures. As Rob said above they are actually about the correct scale size at 14mm. Cheers Matt.

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  6. brilliant looking units, impressed
    cheers Old John

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