Starting New 28mm DBA Hun Army

After I completed my 28mm DBA Armenian army I went to Cold Wars 2012 and entered into a DBA tournament ... and got smashed. Not really surprising because I had never played an Armenian army, not even a single time, so I really had no practice. (That I was not playing much DBA at all did not help either.) I came back home, put the box of troops on the shelf, and there it sat for four years until I recently took it to show it off a friend. We played a couple of DBA games using 15mm troops, but it started me to think that I need to make an opponent to this army so I can use it more.

I've looked at the enemies of the Armenians before and was thinking about the Early Imperial Roman army, but as noted when I tried making some, the helmets are quite a project. I needed something simpler. As DBA is up to 3.0 now, I looked through the new army lists and found that they could match up against the Hunnic army, which consists of one General as Cavalry or Light Horse and 11 Light Horse elements. I like Light Horse armies and this seems simple enough.

I decided to start on the first element – the General as Cavalry – and use a few new build ideas that I had been thinking about. So here is the final build of the element. It has two different style of figures.

 

The figure in brown is made with two beads, one stacked on top of the other, while the other two are a single, oval bead.

One of the inspirations for building this army was finding a novelty bead called a 'moustache bead'.

The bead in the center is the original, unaltered bead. By sanding away some of the underside of the bead (on the left) you get more of a composite bow look. By sanding on the top and bottom sides you get more of a longbow look. The figure in brown is carrying the bow, so you can get a sense of scale.

The figures in orange and blue represent a huge leap in minimalist (for me) in that the head and body are a single part, an oval bead.

At first I was skeptical about using these beads would be useful, given their simple shape. As I started adding the other bits, for example for the head covering, the arms and legs (hot glue), and the weapons, I saw that it actually worked out well. The key was giving the figure a hat, so the head did not look so pointy.

For the hat I found another novelty bead. I am not sure what it is – maybe some sort of flower – but it makes for a great padded leather cap.

I glued these to the top of the bead, sanded the top down a little so the hole was not so prominent, filled the hole with glue, and then added a short piece of yarn between the head and the hat to act as fur trim. All in all, I liked the effect. I just need to find a way to vary the look a little, other than by painting different fur colors.

The brown figure was made differently. For this I used two cylinder beads – one of which is shown below – and stacked them on top of one another. The bead for the head is shown here, with a taller cylinder for the body. I used the same novelty bead for the hat. As a way of making figures, it worked fine, but I was so struck with the look of the single oval bead that I will probably not use these for this army.

With my experiments on making horse in 12mm I started using oval beads – similar to the ones that I used for the bodies of the orange and blue figures – for horse's heads. Normally I use the split eggs, shown on the left below, for the forequarters, hindquarters, and the head. I was never really fond of using the exact same size egg for all three. I always felt like the head should have been smaller.

 

Now I use oval beads for the head, only I use ones that are more "squat" in appearance. Almost what are called barrel beads. Using these kind of beads allowed me to stop using a flathead plug as the neck, so I have essentially swapped two wooden parts for one.

Well there you have it. One stand down, 12 more to go. I just need to come up with a way to vary the head coverings a little more. I guess I will have to suffer a trip to the craft store to get some inspiration! 😉

Getting Minimalistic Over the Weekend

Hi Everyone,

I was going to hold off posting my bead warriors since Dale just posted, but he encouraged me to go ahead and post.  Over the weekend I put together three stands of troops.  I will discuss the building process, the painting, and then also my subjective feelings about these little fellows, both good and bad.  In terms of historical miniature gaming, I am one of those people that has one period that I like significantly more than all others.  For me that's ancients, and specifically ancient warfare from about 500 BC to around 100 BC.  Because of this, I am a sucker for Alexander the Great and the Successors battles in particular.  So, not surprisingly, this is the army I started with when doing my first batches of bead warriors. 

Over the weekend, I got three bases done, two phalangite bases and one skirmisher base.  I try and use everything from a craft store or online craft shop, so even the bases are precut ones that I buy online for not much money.  They are about 3 inches wide (just a little shy of that actually), 1.25 inches deep, and 1/4 inch thick.  I wanted thick bases for these little fellows because a) I think it looks cool, and b) while in play I want people handling the bases, not the figures.

They are essentially painted the same as my "28mm" wooden ancients figures I make using spools and such.  So they are way more "meeplish" than Dale's figures in appearance.  Here is a closeup of the phalangites.

And here is what they are made with.

The body is a 5/16" Flat Head plug, and the head is a Maple Button Plug 1/4" in size.  You just glue the mushroom plug on top of the wider end of the flat head plug and that's it.  The pikes are toothpicks with the sharp end cut off of one of them.  The shields are called "brads."  You get them in a craft store in the area that has the paper and scrapbooking stuff.  They are designed to hold pieces of paper together as they have two sharp prongs that you can bend open and then shut again to hold the paper, but I snip those off.  Honestly, this is just a 10-12mm version of the same figures I do at 28mm with spools and mushroom caps, it's just that the mushroom cap is smaller, instead of a spool for the body I used a flat head plug, and the brad I use for the shields is smaller.

To illustrate this, here is a comparison photo of the 28mm phalangites I made years ago, and the new 10/12mm phalangites I made this past weekend.

As far as painting goes, very, very easy.  Dale is right, you can really get lost in painting details that don't matter.  What I tried to do was identify what was the most distinctive thing on the actual soldier and just paint those things.  So for the phalangites, it's obviously the helmet and the linen armor.  The linen armor pattern is just made up, it is just a "suggestion" of the linen armor.  You can't really see it in these pictures but I did paint hands on the back side of the pikes to give the appearance of them holding it, but that's it for details.  Helmet, face and eyes, linen armor, and that's about it for painting details.

For my skirmishers, I wanted to try and give some variety in appearance.  Also, obviously, there are way fewer of these figures on the base, although the base itself is the same size.  Here is what these guys are made from.

All have the same 8mm bead body.  The first one on the left and the third one from the left have the same head, which is a 1/4" round head plug.  I actually bought these thinking I would use them for the hoplite heads when I get around to doing them, but they are too small.  I need one size larger, which I will eventually get.  The second one from the right has a head made from the same mushroom cap as the phalangites, and the one on the far right has a head that is simply a 1/4" round ball.  The bows they are holding are the ends of a tile spacer cut in the horseshoe shape and glued to the body.  Painting was easy, although I thought they looked funny until I put the belts on them

What I like about these little guys:
1.  Inexpensive.  Even me buying "custom" parts instead of just going with the standard beads from a craft store, they are still really cheap to make if you buy the pieces in bulk.

2.  Fast to paint.  Wow, I literally did the bases staggered, so that I was at a different point with the painting of each so that I could be painting one while another one was drying.  For these three bases, with a total of 28 figures, I may have 3 actual hours of work in them, and honestly, a lot of that time was waiting for the glue and paint to dry.

3.  Mass effect.  Just like with all 6mm or 10mm figures, you can get so many of them in a small area on the board it looks really good, even with my cartoony meeple style, they look good when they are put together like in the first picture.

4.  Light.  Especially if you used a thinner wooden base, you would find that each base weighs less than one 28mm metal figure.  Actually, I think even my thicker bases still weigh less.  So for those of us like me that like to run convention games, or run games at a gaming club where you have to transport everything, my old back is very happy to be moving a box of these guys around compared to a box of 28mm metal figures.

What I don't like about these little guys:
1.  Fiddly.  There is no real way around this unless you do what Dale does which is paint them on the base.  I don't do that, and by not doing it they are hard to hold onto when you paint them.  The phalangites are not, you can hold onto the pike, but the skirmishers and the base of Hypaspists I am working on now, it is impossible not to get paint all over your hands.  In the future I might try to use some sort of putty tack to stick them to a base that I can hold onto when painting them.  That should help to solve this problem.  It's always risky with wood, though, because it absorbs everything, so if the tacky stuff is damp at all, the wood will absorb it and possibly alter the paint.  I hope not though.

2.  <Yawn>.  Okay, I admit it, I can be a bit of a painting snob.  Painting these guys this weekend made me feel the same way that painting 6mm figures made me feel when I used to paint them.  <Yawn>  On the good side, it's hard to paint them poorly.  On the bad side, it's very difficult to paint them very well.  This is definitely a double-edged sword characteristic, because if you wanted to put together an army quickly that looks good on the table, but you didn't care if they looked great, just to try out a period that you do not normally game or something like that, they are perfect for that.  But the point of them is to be minimalistic, and simple, and paint just the most important elements of the figure.  That's great for speed, and for identification on the table top, but for those paint snobs like me out there, it can get really boring really quickly because it is very assembly-line like.  So for me, personally, the level of enjoyment in painting them was far less than for the 28mm ancients I have done with the spools, and definitely less than for the 32mm fantasy figures for rpgs I've been doing of late.

Will I keep doing some?  I will.  I want to do an elephant, and I want to do some cavalry.  I will eventually do enough to put on a game.  I like a huge battlefield with lots of troops on it and this will really fit that bill.  Actually, I sort of like knowing that between even just Dale and I, we have 10/12mm army options, 25/28mm army options, and 40mm army options for figures made out of inexpensive and simple craft store parts.  I, personally, think that diversity in scales for these types of figures is just darned cool.

Female Barbarian Construction

Although I know I'm in the minority, for me the best Swords & Sorcery movie ever made, barely beating out Beastmaster, was the first Conan movie with Arnold.  Truthfully, I thought the second one with Arnold was pretty good too.  I know, I know, most people hated that one.  In preparation for my fantasy game next weekend at Barrage, I wanted to make a female barbarian to go with my male barbarian I already have.  Hopefully, there will be some girls there who would like to play a female barbarian and I want to be ready!

I thought about doing Red Sonja, but I decided to do something different, and more consistent with my favorite S&S movie.  For my female barbarian figure, I decided to do the signature look that Valeria had when the trio (see picture below) broke into the Serpent Cult and stole back the King's daughter.

 At first I was going to go with a much larger figure.  The actress that plays her in the movie is quite the Amazon, but to provide contrast with my huge male barbarian, and because they will both have the same game characteristics, I thought it would be cool to have a female barbarian who was much smaller than the hulking male.

I thought it might be instructional to take you step by step through my construction process because a) you can see how I do it, but also because b) I've never done a figure like this before, so there will be a learning curve ... translation = I'll screw it up several times before I get it to look like I want it to.

The core figure itself is quite simple, as I've opted to use the shaker peg as the main body and head all in one.  This saves time, I like the look of the shaker pegs in general, and also given that she really wears little in the way of armor, the smaller shaker peg is perfect.  Also, she wears nothing on her head so the usual mushroom cap that I like to use for heads just wouldn't look right.  Great for helmeted heads, but not so good for bare heads.  Below is all that will be needed for construction, specifically a shaker peg with a rounded top (can be hard to find, most have mushroom tops), a 1" precut thin wooden circle that comes in a bag of a bunch of different sized precut circles (all useful by the way), three 1/8" tile spacers, and one thin pointed flat stick that also comes in a large bag of probably 100 of them in the bag (from any craft store).

The trickiest thing with this construction are her two bent arms wrapped around her body.  She is too small to use the split eggs and the split spools, which work perfectly for upper and lower arms respectively and also are easy to tilt so you can easily get the angle you need as it is wrapped around the body.  But, alas, she is too small to use these pieces.  Instead, I'll have to get creative with the tile spacers and cut them into bent arms that will work.  Before I even start, I've done several of these for other figures, they are not terribly difficult but you do have to pay attention to the angle of the bend that you want.  The tricky thing with her is going to be the left arm as it is at a tilted angle.  I'll never be able to replicate that, but what I hope to be able to do is to make it so that it can be glued close enough to the body so that it doesn't stick out too far.  Learned that one the hard way.  Made a guy once who looked like he was holding his shield out about 5 feet in front of him because the arm stuck out too far from the body.

Easy thing first, though, and that would be the sword.  Cut the pointed stick to the length you want and then take one of the tile spaces and us the middle part where all 4 arms come together as the hilt.  You will end up cutting off two arms that are opposite each other right up to the center of the tile spacer.  The other two will also be cut, but don't cut them flush up with the middle section.  If you do this, you'll create a rectangle.  Then cut that rectangle in half (it will be too thick for a figure this size's sword).  See picture below.

 Here is the only tricky part with a sword.  To give you a little help in understanding how this is all  going to come together so that you can see what it is we are trying to do, you are going to cut the tile spacer into one piece that is about 2/3 its normal width and the other piece that is 1/2 its normal width.  Do not cut it in half!  You need one of the "halves" to be thicker than the other.  Then cut a notch out of the 2/3 thick side so that the blade of the sword can fit between the tile spacer.  It's like you are cutting a hole out of the middle of the tile spacer, which I did with another figure, but that's way too difficult.  This way I'm describing now I find a lot easier.  Take the thicker piece and cut out a notch that is roughly the size of the width of the sword blade.  Don't fret it too much, too wide of a notch is better than too narrow because glue will fill in any gaps.  When you get finished, you should have something that looks a little like the picture below.  I couldn't get the thin straight piece to stand up on its edge, but you can see what I mean I think.

 Now you are ready to glue the sword together.  Glue the blade into the notched part first and then glue the thin straight piece on the other side of the blade opposite the notched part of the hilt, thereby sealing the blade inside the hilt.  Hard to see in the picture below, but it should look something like this.

Now time to do the dreaded left arm.  Let me just say that this first part I am going to talk about is a MISTAKE!  Don't do this one, but read it so that you can see my mistake and learn from it for your future projects.  In my mistake, I took a tile spacer and snipped off three of the arms.  This left me with another arm still attached to the center square piece which is fine, I will actually use this piece in the part below where I end up figuring out how to do it correctly.  Then I cut that square part off the arm but not flush, I moved down a little bit on the arm so that I ended up with that square piece and a little bit of the arm still on it.  Then I took one of those arms that I snipped off before because they will be a little longer than the arm I just snipped off, and I glued the small end on the arm creating a 90 degree angle. This was the mistake!  The 90 degree angle was too sharp and I was not able to attach it to the body with the angle and tilt that I wanted/needed.  The picture below is of the pieces for my error.

Okay, instead of what I did above, do the following.  Follow the same process as above until you get to where you have the one arm still attached to the square middle piece.  Then cut on an angle about from the square middle piece down the arm.  Just guess at the angle, but it is roughly 45 degrees.  Then get one of the other arms you snipped off earlier and cut roughly the same angle on it, creating a 45 degree joining angle.  See pictures below for the cutting and the joining.  Why this turned out to be so much better is because this angle is not nearly as sharp as the 90 degree angle from my first attempt above, and because it is not as sharp this arm is much easier to wrap around a round shaker peg body and position exactly where I wanted it while still maintaining a strong glue bond.

Now the other tricky arm, the right one.  Cut another tile spacer down to where you have the one arm still attached to the middle square piece.  Then take another of the arms you just snipped off and lay them at a 45 degree angle to one another.  This arm is flat up against the body and the arm bend is actually a little more than 45 degrees.  See picture below for starting point. 

Next cut the angle off the fore arm that you want.  You'll just have to guess (at least that's what I do).  It should look something like this.  Just so that you understand what is happening, the larger piece will end up being the lower right arm that will be glued to the body so that it is roughly parallel to the ground.

Now you'll need to cut the piece for the upper arm.  Tricky thing is, you want to use the rounded part of the arm because it looks like a shoulder, so you won't be throwing that part away.  But you have to judge the angle.  So take another arm that you trimmed off a minute ago and lay it so that it is at the right angle.  You will then be better able to make the cut on the upper arm piece at the angle you want.  After you have done that, you can glue it to the lower arm (all of this is in the next two pictures).

Don't worry to much about them not meeting up well, you can trim that after the glue dries.  However, DO worry about whether the shoulder is over the end of the arm/hand.  If it is, it will block the weapon when you go to glue it into the hands/arms.  Not good!  See picture below for one of my mess ups.  Notice how the upper arm on the left is over the hand/lower arm.  I couldn't use that one and had to throw it away.  I used the one on the right for the actual figure, and I will spare you the profanity that came out of my mouth when I went to use the one on the left and realized what would happen when I tried to mount the weapon on the figure.

Now we have all of our pieces done, the glue has dried, and we are now ready to assemble the figure.  Below are all the parts ready for assembly.

The first step is to glue on the left arm.  The angle for this one has to be exactly the way you want it.  Sometimes it is better to first glue the body to the base so that you can tell, but with a totally round figure like this, it's not as important.  This is not the best picture in the world, but I glued her left arm so that the shoulder was high and the hand/lower arm part was low.  This is will give the illusion that this arm/hand is lower than the right one, even though in reality they are glued so that the hand parts match up exactly so that the strength of the glue for the weapon is maximized.

Next I trimmed the handle of the sword (made it more narrow) because the hands of the figure will be closer together than the normal width of the sword's handle.  Not too tough once the glue is dried, just be careful not to cut your fingers.  Then I glued on the right arm so that the hand pieces of each arm come together to make a 45 degree angle but do not touch.  Use the sword's handle width as a guide for how closely to make the arms.  As before, a little to wide is a lot better than a little too narrow as glue will fill in the gaps.

You are in the home stretch now!  Glue the sword to the two hands.  I like to have the blade facing forward so it ends up that I glue the narrow sides of the sword to the hands.  Get as many contact points as you can, for example put glue on both the inside of the hands as well as the bottom of the hilt to increase strength.  Then you are ready to glue the figure onto the 1" round base.  The finished product is in two pictures below.

She may not look like much yet, but when she dries, she'll be ready for painting and we'll have some fun trying to capture her camo pattern and leather armor and boots.  I will cover painting her in a future entry.

-- Matt

Hot Glue

Generally speaking, I stay away from Hot Glue and Hot Glue Guns. I inevitably burn my fingertips by smooshing it into the molten glue at some point. More importantly, I end up covered in thin glue threads. (If you have used hot glue, you know exactly what I am talking about.) All that said, hot glue does have its uses.

First off, it sets very quickly. It is not unreasonable to expect it to be fixed in place within 30 seconds. It also has a pretty good grip, and parts that do not take shearing stress will stay stuck. It is also fairly water-resistant, unlike white glue. If you ever do need to remove something glued with hot glue, however, an X-Acto knife will go through it quite easily.

Hot glue also has one other interesting property: it can easily and quickly create or modify shapes. Need a nose added to a sphere? A dot of hot glue will do, plus it can be roughly shaped about 15 seconds after application (note the 'burnt fingertips' statement at the start, however) and can be carefully carved with an X-Acto knife after it has set. Do not use a rotary sander, like a Dremel, unless you absolutely want to throw away that sanding drum, however. Hot glue will gum up sandpaper, sanding blocks, and sanding drums in a heartbeat.

When I went to Cold Wars 2012 it was to participate in Matt Kirkhart's and John Acar's recreation of the Battle of Zama using Matt's rules Arrayed for Battle! and Matt's and John's 25mm ancients craftee armies, shown below.

Seeing their armies online inspired me to create my own army, for DBA, in the same scale and style.

Note that these figures are 25mm, whereas most of my other figures are 40mm, as they are based off of the wooden "Boy" game piece. I started thinking about building a companion Seleucid DBA army for the Early Armenian army pictured above, so I went to the workbench and looked at the wooden shapes that I have on hand and started experimenting.

Mushroom Button    

Spool        

Disc                      

Toothpick

Helmet and Head

Body

Shield

Pike

Note that the above pictures are not to scale.

The button-and-spool build is pretty standard. In fact, John Acar was a guest blogger here and showed us how he made his figures for Zama, and he used those same shapes. I like the look of the figure, but what I was trying to avoid was cutting out all of those arms (usually from plastic tile spacers).

The first step I took was to hot glue the plug to the spool to make the basic body. From there I used hot glue to attach the toothpick to the spool, where the butt end would not touch the 'ground', and about where a person might grip a pike. I used a little extra hot glue to make the shape of a right arm and hand.

Next I used hot glue to attach the shield to the pike and to the spool. Where it connected to the pike, I added a dot of hot glue to represent the left hand. Where it attached to the spool, I put a blob of hot glue to represent the left arm. I was going for a look like below; a smaller shield on the left arm where the hand protrudes, so it can grip the pike.

Here is what the unpainted model looks like.

The glue is not very easy to see, so here is the painted model. From the right side and rear you can see the hot glue used to create the shape of the hands and right arm.

Two other views, allowing you to see the left hand and arm.

As you can see in the last picture, I am continuing with my new style for painting faces. By using a darker flesh color you can give the impression of 'five 'o'clock shadow' beards rather well. Something I have not really been able to achieve before. Maybe a painting tutorial on that, if there is any interest.

The shield design is a shield transfer scanned, shrunk down, and printed onto paper, then glued onto the wooden shield. (I did not do the scanning, however, as I found the design on the Hät website.)

All in all I think the figure looks pretty good. The figure also takes significantly less time to make and paint than the 40mm figures I normally do. Time to think about starting the entire army…

Dark Ages Warlord in Sutton Hoo Helmet

I finally finished my Dark Ages Warlord. You can click on the images below to get a close-up of the detail. Painting the Sutton Hoo-style visor on the helmet was fun and really adds character to the figure. I experimented a little with adding 'scars' to the shield (that's what those ugly, out-of-place lines are). Next effort will be better, but I am not upset with the results. The lines are just a little too fat. The chainmail turned out fine, but I am still debating whether to add a cloak to the fellow.

Not only did I use foam for the arms on this figure, but I made the sword from it too. I have been re-thinking which elements should be foam and which should be wood (or some other material). On my upcoming French Napoleonic Carabiniers (1807) you will see some new uses of foam. I am putting the finishing touches on the horse's paint jobs, so it should not be long. But, I will be making their swords from foam too. I decided to try a few foam weapons because of all the "casualties" I have had with my figures so far, it is the wooden swords that have fallen off the most, My theory is that because the wood does not flex, when the figure is accidentally bumped or dropped, all it can do is absorb the impact (i.e. glue holds, but is weakened) or break. The foam will flex, so it should survive. We will see, and I will report on it here.

I have already started building my Anglo-Danish army for Saga. I have the basic figure, helmet, feet, and base for eight Hearthguard and eight Warriors. I am still working on the 12 Levy, but they are almost complete (making them, that is; painting still a ways off). As for an opposing army, that is even further off.