Perry Miniatures Italian Wars of Louis XII - Mercenary Pikemen

Next up in this series is a 'unit' of 20 pikemen, intended for use as Italian mercenaries.  To this end, they have no overall colour scheme; instead, i've gone for four sub-unit colour schemes, so that they can either be split into four (or two), or else all mixed for a more random appearance.

Firstly, a subtle blue and red scheme - unusually (for me) pairing two fairly bright colours, scarlet and savoy blue.  As I often do with brighter schemes, a bit of neutral (in this case, off-white) helps to blance things out and stops them looking too garish.

Side view of the 'blue' troops.  The red hat on one of the pikemen might be a bit 'too much', but it's easy to see why red / white / blue is such a popular combination for flags!

An even bigger departure for me here, as I tried with these chaps to be as 'un-uniform' as I could - though they still ended up with three red brigandines between them... oh, and another red hat.

Even with the matching brigandines, this grouping still looks much less organised than the others.

Next we have the troops inspired partly by a well-known Swedish furniture chain, and partly by a renaissance painting.  This uses the same blue as the red-and-blue scheme at the top of this post, but this time teamed with a nice deep yellow.

Side view of the IKEA guys.  I chose mostly heavily-equipped miniatures for this crew, as the blue and yellow looks quite expensive - perhaps suggesting long-service mercenaries, or perhaps a state contingent who could afford better gear.

Finally, a sub-troop inspired by the colours of the Italian flag - though this green perhaps owes more to pizza boxes than to an actual tricolore.  Again, I've paired two pretty bright colours here, so there's some off-white and brown to reduce the impact a bit.  But not much...

Side view.