Photos of Medieval Hungarians for L'Art de la Guerre
From Essex Miniatures
After finishing the 10mm French and the 28mm Assyrians, the next Lockdown project has been a 15mm Essex Ready Made Medieval Hungarian army. It's originally sold as a FoGAM army, but with a bit of a squint has more than enough troops to give me all the options and more for both a Feudal and Medieval Hungarian ADLG list
There is lot's more of this stuff on my Links Page
The Packs
With extra time in Lockdown I also took this as an opportunity to take more time than I usually do in painting the army, and especially to try and do the horses properly
Horses have always been a bit of a mental block for me, as I've never bitten the bullet and studied how to do them, meaning I end up with either some childlike "brown" and "black" horses, or I just do black undercoat, a wettish drybrush with a brown colour and then hope that Armypainter will do the rest.
(If you can't be bothered with the work in progress shots, the finished figures are on a separate page here)
This time however I was determined to do this properly - so I started with horses on lolly sticks (normally I base them up first!), sprayed them all white and then did a range of not-too-thick colours using the Coat d'arms horse paint range. A bit of study using those online horse colour charts showed that the bay horses should have black tails, but the dun ones don't - so already at this stage I was better off than usual.
The army being Hungarian, I elected to do most of the straps and reins in greens and reds, those being Hungarian colours. There are a few others to mix it up, but most are green or red.
Not many of these have saddle cloths, so the saddles were just brown, followed by a coat of ArmyPainter soft tone all over.
I then added additional layers of darker Army Painter inks on the lower legs of the brown horses to darken their lower parts.
Because I was taking more time than usual I also built up the bases using wood filler, and then gave all of the bases a coat of fairly think Coat D'Arms wood brown to make it consistent. I even did the edges as well !
For the basing I then glued on semi-sieved builders sand (basically taking out the big lumps), stained the resulting base with Rustins Wood Stain, and when that was dry drybrushed thenm all with pale grey and finally Skeleton Bone
A sunny day allowed me to get them all outside and give them a matt coat of Testors Dullcote - before adding the static grass, or indeed the riders. The theory here was that the static grass always ends up stuck to the horses in some way, so I wanted to try adding it right at the end rather than pre-varnishing
From this angle you can more easily see the grading of darkness on the lower parts of the horses
In the meantime I'd also been painting the riders - again lots of red and green, but also a whole load of banners.
The banners were another experiment - I got a new printer recently so I tried printing out banners from the old Krigspiel.dk site, and also printing out shields as well for the riders and infantry.
The shield patterns I found on searched of Pinterest for 'Hungarian Heraldry' and similar phrases, and resizing them in Microsoft Word (!) to fit the shields.
This is a shot of a printed shield sat on a horse earlier in the process. The shield is printed a little bigger than needed, glued on with PVA which softens the paper as well to mould it to the shield, allowed to dry and then gloss varnished. The gloss varnish both protects the paper and seems to make the colour ping out a lot more too.
Here's a lot more of the shields, again pre-varnish. The quartered ones are especially effective I think, with bold colours. Some are much more detailed shields cut out of scans of historical books!
Here's a few more pre-gloss varnishing. They are all painted around the paper - it wasn't too hard to pick a paint that matched closely enough to work as these are tiny shields in reality, so the painted area is really small - a bit of colour variation simply isn't noticable
The army has a load of Late Medieval knights too - these were easier to do! All of the flags are from Krigspiek.dk, and I did remember to paint the edges here too!
Pre Medieval Hungary
These are the LH with bow - 4 units. They included a couple of upcycled old Mirliton figures from a Teutonic army I got years ago but for which I now have far too many figures. They are the horses without coloured strapping, just the leathery stuff.
And, with many of the shields and flags yet to be gloss varnished, here's a load of the Medium and Heavy Cavalry with bows. You can just about see the paper crinkling on the shield at the front, and the slighly imperfect painting on the edge of the striped shield on the guy in the 2nd rank - none of which shows at gaming distances at all.
Also in the upcycling pile were 3 bases of religious pilgrim rioters - Impetuous Horde. I rebased and slightly tarted up a few of my existing medieval Horde figures and used 1mm plastic rods to fashion some crosses which are glued at the "X" by squishing the rod a little in a pair of tiny pliers first so the joining surfaces are both flat.
For the final figures I also added some religious icons - again searched for on Pinterest, downloaded and printed out - these are glued onto very thin card, like the type used in business cards.
On the left hand end of this line a General has snuck into shot. His horse pattern is also printed - I had too many Generals so I tried printing horse-cloths and again glueing them on with PVA to mould the paper round the butt of the horse - and surprised myself ho wwell it worked. A shart scalpel to trim off the loose paper after it had dried left a pretty decent horse bard, with a neater logo than I could hope to manage myself, and a bit of painting over it at the joins and job's a good-un.
Yet more upcycling - these are a mixed bag of flailmen and dismounted knights who will act as the HI Sword, as the Essex pack only includes spear types.
The shields here are almost all the printouts from a book of actual patterns - the detail does get lost a little when printing at this scale, but it looks like it's still there at gaming distances!
And here they are finished off, and next to the Pilgrims
The diagonal striped shield here is a printed out copy of a photo of an actual shield from a museum, presumably in Budapest I guess! The eagle-type one isn't really so good, but ... if you don't know I'm sure it looks OK
Things not to do in Hungary
Here's all the foot and horses before I finished the riders.
And again
The ADLG army has Medium Knights in the list, so to do those I used unarmoured horses with 2 out of every 3 riders being in knighly armour. I could have used 3, but the Essex pack didn't have enough to do that - and this adds more colour too
And here are the paints and inks used on the horses.
I have a whole page of the finished troops with close-up photos taken in a light box for you to see here
That's the end - so why not go back to the Links Page and browse through some more stuff
