Dixmude 1489 part 1, foot knights

The day job, home, family etc has been quite hectic and i'll be honest I've just been exhausted in my downtime. It's been frustrating at times as I've been finding that when I'm away from the painting table I have a real urge to paint but can't and when I have time I often just don't feel it at all. Burnout.

However, the last couple of weeks I've put a bit of discipline into things and made a real effort to break the impasse. I've got various projects on the go which in itself can be a bit depressing as they sit there for months not being painted so I decided I'd add one more ! I wanted a quick result to kickstart things and opted for some foot knights as I considered I could get a good production line going and have fun assembling them.

The initial inspiration for these was the idea of creating a small early Tudor force for the battle of Dixmude 1489. There's a good article about it here. Henry VII sent a force of 1000 archers under command of among others Giles, Lord Daubeney, Captain of the Calais Garrison. 

I've got plenty of archers so for my part I just need to create some foot knights for the personalities and hopefully a few vignettes.

Daubeney was first up and needed some armoured colleagues. You can read more about Daubeney

here, he's got an interesting military career including putting down the Cornish Rebels at Blackheath which could be fun to represent.

These were all just Perry Miniatures foot knights assembled straight from the box, there's a lot of inspiration online for good assembly combinations and these were some of my favourites;

The armour is suitable easily up to around 1515 and beyond for many of the poorer nobles. There are a wealth of effigies depicting Tudor noblemen in older armour and heraldic surcoats.

The standard bearer is metal from a pack of Perry WOTR standard bearers, banner is from Pete's flags.

The painting process for these were as follows;

• black undercoat
• paint the armour in Foundry Metal mid-shade
• wash with 1:2 mix of Games Workshop Nuln Oil and Agrax Earthshade
• light drybrush of Foundry metal shade
• Neatly highlight with Foundry metal mid-shade
• light wash of a 1:1 mix of Foundry British Blue Grey shade and Granite shade with water 
• Highlight with Foundry Spearpoint metal highlight 

They really 'pop' at the last 2 stages, the blue defines it and makes the metal appear brilliant. All other areas were then painted in the usual way. I had them on a production line and finished them over the course of a week, working in the evenings.

I've another base of foot knights to do so I have practiced enormous self control in not basing these figures yet. This way I can have a play around with which combinations work best.

Bye for now, there's another update straight after this.

Stuart