From IanW - ECW and Ancient 6mm (80 Points)

It's been a great ride this year, big thanks to Curt for running what has been an epic challenge. This looks to be the last entry from me due to being a complete idiot :-)

The first four regiments for a mates Parliament army to be pitched against my Royalist Oxford Army. I will also paint up The New Model as well at some point.

Earl of Essex's Foote Regiment. The figures are Baccus and of all the figures I have painted the ECW castings are the only ones I would say are not good. It's mostly the muskets though the whole range would benefit with re-sculpting but that is on the cards for later.

Lord Sayy and Selees Blue coated regiment, one of the few that we can attribute the correct flags to, most of the others including Essex are just generic flags. I have never been a follower of the idea that the flag was the same colour as the coats theory.

Thomas Ballards Foote, rather boring grey coats so I gave them a nice green standard to fight under. I am painting up the Essex army of 1642 for Lee, these will act as the core but given that both of us have two army packs each we have plenty of other regiments I can add to these. I intend to do a few units of my own each time I do some of Lee's so that we will both have a reasonable force at the same time.

Lord Brooks which is another regiment that we know the standard colour of and again they also had coat colours the same, well for the first year, after that I believe they were replaced with grey in 1643 or 1644. 

As a last hurrah for the Ancients in the challenge I painted up a block of Hoplites, these again are Baccus and unfortunately the photo does not do them justice though those shields are not great.

Keeping with the mass idea these are on a 30x60 base with 48 figures in total. One pack makes two units, I think I just need a couple at the moment but will expand them in the future.

Points wise the ECW are 28 figures per base and the Hoplites are 48 for a total of 160 figures so 80 points getting me past my 2000 point total.

The army so far, actually it is missing the four heavy stone throwers but you can see the progress made in this challenge as this is a new project. I sure need more heavy infantry!

Last night I even flagged the Hanoverian's from last week. Indeed the flagging of the ECW and these was quite difficult, I did also try painting but it was getting quite painful so it looks like I won't finish any more figures within the Challenge.

On Sunday afternoon I took a pan out of the oven and seconds later (with the oven mit in my right hand) tried to move said pan by it's metal handle with my LEFT hand. 200C metal will sting a bit, fortunately we have a burn gel in hand (ha ha) and that has preserved the skin a lot but finger tips are sore and just under half the palm has various levels of burn. Thanks to the gel it looks better than it should though the raised area near the closed fingers is solid, feels like plastic on the surface and very tender below. As such gripping is a bit of an issue :-)


From Curt:

Owchie!! Yikes, that looks painful Ian. I hope you mend soon and without too much discomfort. Look on the bright side it could have been like that German dude in Raiders of the Lost Ark... Okay, I got nothin'.

Even though I find the pikes a bit unconvincing in 6mm these guys look brill.  The groundwork is excellent and I think the vibrant banners really cap them off nicely.

That all being said, the stars of the show, in my opinion, are those Spartans with the teeny-tiny lambdas on their shields. Totally mental. Love it.

Congratulations on hitting your 2K target Ian!  It was terrific to have you join us for this fifth Challenge romp.