Perry Miniatures Wars of the Roses Billmen - red livery

Following on from the last post, these are the red-liveried troops;

I went the same way with these chaps as with the blue-liveried fellows - mostly browns and greys for the hose and sleeves.  The dark red is a favourite colour of mine from the Games Workshop range - 'Khorne Red'.  It works nicely with grey, though the contrast with the browns I've used is not great... with hindsight, maybe black or off-white would have worked better.

The light grey is from a cheap acrylic art set I bought in a bargain book shop - art paints are a different formula to model paints, generally thicker, but with (curiously) less pigment, so if you normally use one coat (for black or dark grey, for example) you need to use two with art paints.  With this light grey, two coats was enough, though usually light colours need three for dense coverage.  The paints often also dry with a slight sheen, which you can use to advantage for horses / leather; this wasn't a problem for me, as I wash all the cloth areas with thinned brown paint anyway, which leaves them dead matt.  I don't usually varnish miniatures.

The light grey on the right hand chap's sleeves is the colour mentioned above, but the darker grey is actually Panzer Grey.  It's a slightly bluer grey, which works well with the dark red, but clashes a bit with most lighter reds.

The changing fashions of 15th century warfare, with the leftmost chap in an old-fashioned steel cap, the middle guy in ultra-trendy short jack and sallet, and the other fellow in an exotic 'ear-muffed' helmet more commonly seen on the continent (for non-UK readers, it's common for the English to refer to the rest of Europe as 'the continent'... deep down, we don't see ourselves as Europeans at all!).

Interesting to compare these two armoured chaps with those similar troops from the blue unit.  Here, I've gone with red hose (on the breastplated model) as very little sleeve was visible.  The other chap has only half-armoured legs, but the panzer grey hose give the impression of full plate from the waist down.  I might use the colour trick again in future.  At a pinch, I could have scribed lines down the inside and outside of his calves, and painted the hose in a metal finish... hmmm... I'll give that a try on some up-coming command units and you can judge for yourselves.

Two chaps with boar spears in this last grouping.  For a long time, I didn't really use the boar-spear arms in bill units - I preferred the extra metal on show - but now I think they're cool.  The arms also fit the Fireforge crusader foot sergeants, so if you want to model those with no shields, you can use the Perry arms (see earlier posts for other examples of Fireforge / Perry crossovers).