Guards! Guards!

Human guards, foot soldiers, etc.

These are mostly from a couple different sets of "medieval knights" from Caesar Miniatures, with a few Accurate "English Men-at-Arms" in addition. I wanted these to be useful for either "good" or "bad" guys; blue is classic for good and red for bad, so I split the difference and went for purple, which sadly is barely perceptible here even after image enhancements. For some reason the pics here didn't turn out very well, so if you get a slightly queasy feeling looking at these, my apologies.

Dudes with polearms. The chap in the middle apparently drew the short stick, literally. These are three poses with headswaps and a few other mods for variety. The halberds on the left are a little bendy; the spears on the right were even more so (as you can see in this post), until I decided at the last minute to swap them for some more rigid Italeri barbarian spears. I was worried that this operation would be catastrophic, but the soft plastic Caesar uses was able to bend and not break. That softness of course was what made the original spears intolerably bendy in the first place; there's some sort of lesson here, but I can't put my finger on it.

Anyway, more guard fellows with livelier poses. The two captains in the middle are the Accurate figures. The one on the right got a headswap with the second crossbowman from the left, which I had actually forgotten about until I tried to find the original figure on PSR. What I'm saying is I think the Accurate and Caesar figures work great together here.

The guards of course complement the bandits from my last big painting project.

I'm sure this is a political metaphor of some kind.

As with the bandits, I tried to mix up my usually Caucasian humans with some duskier skintones. Not historically accurate, but as these aren't intended for historic gaming that's not an issue!

Stay tuned for more mini comparisons. I'm going to give the multi-figure projects a rest for a while and try my hand at some dragons, so look out for those as well!

Guards and Bandits and Bondic

No I'm not dead, real life vs. hobby time, etc. Let's move on:

I finally got a chance to take some pics of my next project, these bandits and guards.

The bandits are a mix of Hat's reissued Airfix "Robin Hood" figures and Zvezda's medieval peasant levy. The guards are mostly Caesar medieval soldiers, with a couple Accurate knights (acquired in a trade with Mike) thrown in. Most are out of the box, but I indulged in a few mods.

Fantasy guards are often depicted with polearms and crossbows for some reason, so I tried to select the Caesar figures that were so armed. This only left a few available poses. The answer: headswaps, plus some knifework to remove scabbards and the like for variety.

The bandits didn't need as many mods, but some of them that would otherwise have been wielding scythes and similar peasant weapons got armswaps (a scythe-wielding bandit seemed very strange!). Here you can see my new fascination in use. Normally when doing mods like this, I'd use wood glue to fill any gaps. But lately I've been experimenting with a newish product called Bondic, and I'm pretty happy with it.

Bondic is a non-adhesive bonding agent that's sort of magical. It's a solution with various plastic elements as the solutes. These plastics tend to form a solid, except the solution prevents them from doing so almost indefinitely. Zap the liquid with a UV light (the orange device in the pic above) after applying it with the pen-like tip, though, and the solvent evaporates. [edit: I didn't have this exactly right. See my comment below] The result is a solid mass of plastic in about four seconds where there once was a liquid. Magic!

I've found all sorts of household applications for the stuff, but the relevant use is for filling gaps in modded figures.

I also made up this bard-type figure, using an Imex pioneer figure for the torso (Sean did something similar, but I can't find the post right now).

You can perhaps see that the gaps around the arms of the gray Zvezda figures have some clear plastic around them. The base of the tan Hat fig also has some to fill the visible part of the hole in the washer I used as a base. That's the cured Bondic in use. The big advantage Bondic has over glue for this sort of thing is ease of control: you can add as little as you need, it tends to flow into crevices, and you can always build up applications if you need more. It's also a lot more durable than glue, as it's solid plastic. Just remember that it can't be used to glue things together like adhesive, but for filling visible gaps it's hard to beat.

I also took some shots after priming, just so you can see how it looks painted. No gaps!

I'm still in the middle of a big freelance job, but hopefully I'll have more time to work on figures soon. Thanks for checking in!