Landsknecht Pike

This base is the fruit of a project long in the making, I painted the first figure 2 years ago (there's a reason I don't do commissions !) and it sat longing for companionship while I busied myself with bow and bill. However, over the last couple of months I've regularly had a landsknecht undercoated and in my painting queue for any time I fancied a change resulting in the bulk of this unit.

My Tudor army has a fairly sizable landsknecht element to it so I began busying myself painting units of standing pike with banners, I then wondered how best to use the figures I had with levelled pikes and after much deliberation I came up with the solution shown in the above two photographs;

The core of the pike unit will be those standing with banners with units of attacking / levelled pikes in front without banners, when complete I'll have a large pike square. Another notion is that the levelled units being without banners could be used in any army (this is a lifelong project methinks), note also the basing of them - no tangled figures on the gaming table and they're easier to pick up and store not to mention that it's fun to come up with things to fill the ground of the forward base, be it dead, discarded weapons or charging doppelsoldner.

I also wanted to get this unit quite tightly based to try and show the 'push of pike' but not too tight that you can't pick out each colourful pikeman, here's a few in detail;

I'm aiming to have at least another two bases like this, it could be a while yet but it will be a joyous task as these figures are great, I'll never get bored of them.

This is also a perfect opportunity to shamelessly plug another site I have, it sadly doesn't get as many updates as this one but if you ever find yourself with some landsknechts to paint and need some pointers or inspiration (hopefully) have a look at my landsknecht painting guide;

http://www.stuartmulligan.com/new_page_1.htm

I have recently added a gallery page to it featuring a few of the above and more.

Stuart