Anyway - enough my psychological foibles. You can't really have a medieval battlefield without crossbowmen on it somewhere (even if they're just being ridden down by exciteable French knights), so the client requested 24 of them. As with the sergeants, I thought finishing them in two units of 12 might offer flexibility - and this is likely what he had in mind in the first place, rather than being my inspired notion;
Style #1 is quartered scarlet / white. All those in the above picture are from the standard options in the Fireforge sergeants boxed set, with the chap third from left sporting mail-clad arms and head from the Templar infantry set. There are large rectangular pavises to go with these chaps, which feature a black heraldic design - so I've chosen the odd sleeve and hose to finish in black or dark grey, to compliment this.
Style #2 is quartered blue / white. Again, I've thrown in some mailed arms, and gain I've chosen hose / sleeves here and there to echo the heraldic design on the pavises - in this case, gold / yellow.
My favourites - the archers. Only 12 of these chaps, but they were fun to put together. They use Fireforge bodies and heads (apart from the chap at extreme left, who sports a Gripping Beast head); combined with the arms from Perry Miniatures Wars of the Roses archers. I used a combination of short sleeve / amiled sleeve designs, as many of the arms in the Perry set are far too 15th century for this sort of model. The limited choice was not a problem, as the Fireforge bodies are quite dynamically posed - so the same arms on two different bodies makes for a radically different look.
No unit colour scheme for these chaps - though they mostly sport Opal Fruits / Starburst acid colours; bright green, orange, strawberry red, lemon yellow. The remaining garments are mostly unbleached wool (off white) or red-brown leather. The sheaves of arrows are taken from the Perry Wars of the Roses set, but the quivers are Wargames Factory Orc ones, or Gripping Beast Arab ones. Despite what Hollywood shows, most medieval archers kept their arrows in barrels, then grabbed a handful before battle commenced - sometimes in a bag, or wrapped in a cloth, but often just wedged in the belt or carried in the hand (to be stuck in the ground later).
The last element in the army is a unit of twelve 'bargain basement' peasant spearmen. The design cue was unarmoured / basic, so I went with the cloth hooded heads from the Fireforge set. There are only two designs of this, so I've tried to vary the skin / hair tone and the colour of the hood to make them look less like clones.
I used four different schemes for the shield designs, red/white, black/white, blue/white, and burgundy/gold. The idea here is that some local lords have donated shields to their peasant levy, but everything else is their own - so they have a basic spear, and their clothing is mostly unbleached wool, or dyed various vegetable colours (green, brown, grey). Yes, I know there aren't really grey vegetables, but you get the idea - neutral colours!
The shields are all backed with red-brown woodgrain adhesive plastic. In a future post, I'll show such a shield being created.
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