From DallasE: Norman Infantry and Squats (!) (75 points)

Getting back here to a period I haven't visited in a long time indeed... Dark Age (can we call it that?) Early Feudal Normans. I have a pretty sizeable army (mostly early Gripping Beast, as seen here, but a few Crusader models sprinkled through) that I painted probably 12 years ago or more. In fact, their first appearance on our Fawcett blog was back in 2012, in a battle report from a game where we used the Lord of the Rings rules! (of course)

So why revisit this army now, more than 10 years after I painted its last model? Well, GregB of Challenge fame is coming to visit in a couple weeks and wanted to have a game at my place. "Sounds great," I said, "what do you want to play?" He replied that he wanted to bring his (gorgeous) Byzantine army for a battle against my Normans. I thought this was a superb idea and asked if he had any more figures to paint - he said he had some Varangians. I looked in a Plano case here and found a dozen more Normans, so we challenged each other to paint 'em for the upcoming game. So here are my Normans!

 

Again, models are from Gripping Beast's ancient metal stock. Nice enough models but I really dislike the separate weapons, as I can never seem to get them to look like the models are holding them naturally. About half of these 12 needed greenstuff work on the hands to "wrap" the fingers around the grips.

All Hand-Painted Shields (tm) of course...

These lads will do nicely as a unit of 12 foot knights in our game. We'll be using Warhammer Ancient Battles, which we also haven't rolled out in 10 years or more. It's gonna be a blast from the past all around!

The other few models I painted this week are some more plastic Squats. I'd initially done the army with three squads of 9 infantry but thought I would use the couple of parts left in the box to round the squads out to 10 Squats each. There was just enough parts left to do that.

 

Of course I've complained before that the "Space Dwarfs" box only came with three head variants, and all that were left in my box were bald heads. So as I'd done before, I got out the greenstuff and went to town. I particularly like the blond mullet in the middle of the pic above, it's a "look".

And here are the three (now 10-Squat) squads.

As for points:

    12 x 28mm Norman infantry              60 points

    3 x 28mm Squat infantry                    15 points

    TOTAL:                                              75 points

Thanks for looking, see you next time and have a great week!

Love the shield work, bonus points accrued. How cool are squats - very.