After a bit of a hiatus I’d like to present my latest unit for the English army at Formigny: a unit of longbowmen. As I mentioned in my previous post since seeing the conversions others had done by adding the bows from the HYW English Army box to WOTR bodies I was convinced that this was the way to go. The HYW bows have a much more authentic and chunky feel to them, as well as being a bit longer, which I think makes them a much more accurate representation of the warbow. Converting them was a little fiddly at times but they went together quite easily generally and, in a lot of cases, I just used the arms straight from the sprue without doing hand swaps (the jacks and aketons from the HYW set also seem a lot more detailed than those from the WOTR one, you can certainly see the advance in sculpting and moulding between the kits).
Painting wise I made quite extensive use of GW’s contrast paints. Since these came out I’ve found them to be an absolute godsend when painting things like leather or cloth, as they provide really good shading with a single coat. A couple of years ago there’s no way you could have convinced me I’d ever paint a model without several layers of shading and highlighting but now, having a family and much decreased painting time, I’ll take any tool that enables me to speed things up while providing a good result. Having said this I’m not keen on the finish these paints provide on some areas, skin for example, so have used them as a base and then highlighted up after adding in additional details such as eyes. Any livery jackets have been painted with some variation of the St George’s cross worn by English troops in France
In order to provide some degree of usability in a WOTR setting, I’ve managed to create a removable banner which could be swapped in the future. This was just done by gluing it with PVA and manipulating it into shape around another banner pole. Once dry it can be removed and replaced quite easily and I added a spear point to the top to stop it sliding too far.
Being a former warbow archer one thing I’ve been trying to get right for some time is making the bows look like they’re made of Yew. I’ve found this fairly difficult on miniatures as there really isn’t much space to create the differentiation between the dark heartwood of the bow’s belly and the yellow/cream of its back. In this case though I’m fairly happy with the end result. The models received a coat of Army Painter anti-shine matt varnish and I really like what this has done to bring all the colours together and dull down the shine that some of the contrast paints leave behind.
Next up I think I’ll do another unit of archers, as I really enjoyed putting these guys together.
