Friday, June 5, 2020

From SimonG: "The English Are Coming!" HYW Longbowmen

For my first couple of stands in the English army it had of course to be longbowmen. These are Front Rank miniatures with more of their great facial expressions and crisp detail.




Bow strings and arrows were added by me, you quickly realise that the sculptors haven't always located the bows in anything like realistic positions (especially those with bow held loosely at the side) and the draw is all over the place -- I'll try to remember to fix that on the next lot, of course this is something you can do with metal miniatures but not with plastic where you're stuck with the fixed draw in the original design.








Given we've only got a couple of weeks left I'm not sure what to do next -- I think it would be nice to return to terrain and finish off the remaining two squares I have, then perhaps one stand of mounted archers to round things off -- onwards and upwards!

16 comments:

  1. Excellent work - I really admire the detail of the bowstrings. It makes a huge difference!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes totally agree - great post and the overall look of the bowstring is great, very characterful figures and painting. Big thumbs up ... great motivation to keep painting.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks Noel and Jez -- your positive feedback is most appreciated. The FrontRank castings are very easy to work with with nice room to drill out the hands to thread the strings through, I think I only had to resort to breaking the string once on one figure where the top of the hand was too close to the face, while I could drill it successfully I couldn't for the life of me get it to thread through! The string itself is a synthetic button thread (remember not to use cotton as it can catch fire when you use superglue)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great looking archers! Bowstrings! You're a better man than I am!
    Best Iain

    ReplyDelete
  5. They look amazing, the bowstrings are great. The eyes are also very good on these figures. All in all excellent work!

    ReplyDelete
  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thanks Iain and Martin -- my above comment was because I thought something weird was going on in my focus stacked picture, but turns out it's not, I'd just got confused by all the figures!

    Anyway I do like how the eyes come out -- simple enough really, a black oval, a white infill, a wash of Citadel fleshshade to take the brightness off (while doing the rest of the faces), then dot in the pupil and give it a gloss top coat. And easy to correct at any step on the way. I also work for the eyes only using a magnifying light -- of course macro photography is merciless and shows up cross eyes and snake eyes no end!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thanks so much Matt and Ray!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Brilliant looking archers Simon. Your additional efforts with the bows has really paid off.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Truly some great looking archers. Going that extra step with the bowstrings is very impressive.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Thanks for your feedback Curt, Stuart and Peter -- I really enjoy making the figures pop and getting the most out of them. Currently fiddling with terrain which is a whole other matter, especially when you run out of your preferred base flock mid way through :-)

    ReplyDelete
  12. Very nice! I wouldn’t have the patience for all those bowstrings...

    ReplyDelete