Waaagh! It’s Spring Clean 2023!

Well did I achieve all my goals, no. Am I disappointed, no. I always think I’ll be able to paint more than I can and constantly forget how long it will take me to paint something especially with the amount of conversion and sculpting work I do on certain pieces such as the Cossack conversion I completed.
So in total I painted sixty five Wars of the Roses figures, seventeen WWII, two Napoleonic Cavalry, three Lord of the Rings figures five 40K Orks and a Saxon Huscarl. Making  ninety three  figures in total which is just more than  one figure per challenge day.
I also finished four Carabinier horses and assembled their riders. I also put together every 40K Ork I had in the garage and cleaned and corrected ones I had previously assembled. Every Perry Plastic Wars of the Roses figure that I have has also been assembled and is ready to paint.
In addition I made myself a new wargame ‘teddy bear’ fur mat, made a small wood of trees and up skilled my know how in taking effective miniature photography.
Highlights of my project are the Cossack vignette and my ‘reproductions’ of Wars of the Roses art. I was especially proud of my Three Hunters Lord of the Rings miniatures featuring on the show Cult of Paint as well as also receiving an email from White Dwarf expressing their interest in featuring these models in a future edition. The tutorials I have completed will also be a useful reminder on how I painted certain models when I come to tackle something similar in the future. I have taken a group photo of all the Wars of the Roses models I competed over the course of the challenge which can be seen below.

This is the last thing I finished before the deadline. I used a different palette for the black horse than the one I used in my previous tutorial. I worked from a black base. I then painted all the horse apart from the deepest recesses with Petroleum Grey. The model was then washed  with diluted black ink and finally highlighted with thin Rainy Grey. All the colours are from Scale 75.

These were all made from the Perry boxes and not only from the Bill and Bow set. There are a variety of other heads and arms used although primarily they are from that set. The falling one with the arrow in his chest was made using two arms from the mercenaries boxed set. The pike was removed from one of the arms and they were positioned to look like the arrow had just hit him.  The arrow was cut from a bunch of arrows that come in the box. I drilled a small hole into his chest and glued it in place. The blood effects are easily done with GW Blood for the Blood God. The flag is a free one available from the  Wargaming At The Outpost GY facebook site. As my printer at home is not great I used it as an outline and totally repainted it.

Richard Duke of Gloucester at the battle of Barnet 14th April 1471. This will be the last of my representations of Richard III from my  Wars of the Roses project that I will have time to finish before the Spring Clean ends. I based this on the excellent painting by Graham Turner. Graham has kindly corresponded with me over several matters regarding my interpretations of his work. I carefully chose and assembled the Perry Miniatures parts to help me to mirror his painting. I altered the pole arm carried by the infantryman in the foreground to better match the painting. Richard’s helm also needed to be converted and I used bits from a couple of helmets for this. Finding a suitable pointing arm was a boon even though here it is the wrong pointing arm as it is the opposite one in the painting. The banner bearer’s right arm was originally cast with a sword. I cut this away and replaced it with a pole I made out of wire. I crushed one end with pliers and filed it to a point. I deliberately went for a finer quality finish for the Duke’s armour than his standard bearer. The flag is by Petesflags. I will include a copy of his painting so my vignette can be compared to it. I used pulled apart packing material from Perry boxes to simulate the mist. If you look carefully in the background you can see Perry Billmen as in the original painting.

This is the last of the figures I had the opportunity to paint. It is similar to the first one I showed but this one had no helmet. I painted it in a simple NMM black. I sketched out the highlights with diluted Administratum Grey and further highlights were done with Ulthuan Grey. Edge highlights were also done with this colour. I wasn’t happy with the larger areas of highlighting and glazed them all back with diluted black paint. This resulted in a more realistic smoother blended finish. Spot highlights were done with Vallejo Ivory to make the armour pop.

As I mentioned in my post on making Richard’s charge at Bosworth I needed some background trees. I always thought that those made out of seafoam ( teloxis aristata) looked great and although I knew they would not be particularly sturdy I was not concerned as I primarily wanted them to be used for when I photograph my miniatures. I purchased WSS Scenics realistic Spring tree kit and some extra plastic tree armatures from ebay. The latter were extremely cheap. Photo one shows what I worked with. The kit itself does not come with very clear instructiuons but a few tutorials on Youtube were a great help. As you can see in the photo I have included the two types of tree armature I had purchased and some of the seafoam, the four different types of flock from the kit and I purchased some cheap brown rattle can paints and some not so cheap tree and brush foliage spray again from WSS.

The first stage (photo 2) involves pruning a lot of the branches off the plastic trees. and then gluing them to 2p coins. I then added a band of milliput around the bottom of the bases. The tall tree at the back is made by combining one of the trees trunks from ebay with a WSS one.  I drilled out a hole in each trunk using a wowstick and inserted a piece of wire to make the join more secure. The two parts were then joined with superglue.

In the third photo I have attached the seafoam. Take your time with this and cut small branches off the main pieces that are supplied in the kit. Do not use superglue for this as cheap contact adhesive works best.

I then sprayed the trees with the brown paint (the trunks and branches were dry brushed with GW Zandri Dust)I mentioned earlier before adding the flock with the foliage spray. The pack comes with a bright pink and  red  flock to be used as blossom and to be honest I thought both were way too bright and would result in unrealsitic looking trees. However on looking at images online I thought the colours looked okay and the resulting trees I made with them are my favourite. The green trees are made using the thicker green flock with the lighter flock then applied over the top. ( photos 4 and 5).

The foliage spray left a grey residue and I therefore washed the branches with GW Agrax Earthshade before dry brushing again with the Zandri Dust. I thought the finished trees looked a little sparse so I added more branches of seafoam and repeated the above steps. I finally finished the bases and took a picture of the trees on my teddy bear fur mat with some of the figures I have completed as part of the Spring Clean.

One of my favourite figures from the range. The banner is from one of the Perry Miniatures box sets although I have added extra details to it to give more of a 3D look to folds and raised parts of the ‘cloth’. The miniature is actually designed to have the leading hand wielding the warhammer but I swapped them around and was pleased with the finished pose.

When I first saw the artwork for this I wanted to recreate it in miniature. The art shows a unit of Burgundian Knights charging into a Swiss infantry unit. I wanted to alter it to fit my own Richard III at Bosworth project. I swapped the Knights out for Richard and his retinue Knights. He can be seen in the front row just about to spear an unfortunate billman. His personal banner bearer Sir Percival Thirlwall is also in the front rank. The charge was instigated when Richard spotted Henry Tudor and his retinue in an isolated position on the battlefield. In reality a formed unit of heavy billmen in front of Henry would have dissuaded Richard from making his ill fated charge. To make the ‘history’ work in my head I imagined that a small unit of bills and men at arms have managed to come between Richard and his prize.

To get this to work I had to add a few things (or skills) to my collection. This included the teddy bear mat I described earlier, more trees ( more about this later) and to raise my game in the photograph department ( see my previous article).  One of the most difficult things was to get the angle of the photograph correct so that it would mirror the original painting.