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Author Topic: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf  (Read 46386 times)

Offline Rowsdower

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #100 on: September 10, 2025, 02:17:40 PM »
Damn the renovations. I'm busting out some stuff tomorrow to build

Offline Artobans Ghost

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #101 on: September 10, 2025, 06:19:22 PM »
No butchery going on here. Looking fantastic
Mathi Alfblut Feb 4,2017 Simple, You gut the bastard with your sword, the viking way.
Questions?


GP Jan 4, 2020
Yes, even W:AoS.

Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #102 on: September 11, 2025, 07:23:16 AM »
Damn the renovations. I'm busting out some stuff tomorrow to build

Cool! Let us know how it goes.

No butchery going on here. Looking fantastic

Thanks!

Offline Rowsdower

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #103 on: September 11, 2025, 02:08:23 PM »
I was only able to do a bare minimum today. I undercoated eight guardsmen from my Sharpe's Rifles Mordian army. I couldn't get to my bits box, so 'Big sergeant with multi-barreled rifle' will have to wait for a left arm

Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #104 on: September 12, 2025, 05:12:44 PM »
Nice! I'll call any day a good day if I get to break out the hobby stuff. Any amount of progress is progress.

Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #105 on: September 15, 2025, 12:02:59 PM »
Here's a quick snapshot of my progress so far on the unit (picture links to a full-size version on imgur). The three models on the left are furthest along while the two on the right are playing catch-up.



On the leftmost model I tried to paint the red plume with ink. It looks OK but the paint I used on the other two is much more vibrant so I'll be using that from now on. The dark red lance has grown on me so I'll (re)paint all lances in that colour. I also painted the ribbon on the back of the leftmost knight's helmet and the rope on his horse's tail yellow. I was inspired by this paint job I found online. I really like the splash of extra colour so will be doing that across the unit. I picked a very subdued green for the laurels. It doesn't look bad but I think I'll also try something more vibrant just to make sure I'm not making a terrible mistake. ;) Finally, I painted the thing below the leftmost knight's saddle dark blue. It doesn't look right to me in that colour. Also, I still don't know what it's actually supposed to be. It could be a saddle blanket, part of the saddle or a piece of barding called a flanchard, which protects the horse's side. The shape doesn't really fit any of those though. I've decided to just paint it the same dark red as the saddle to end the analysis paralysis.

Offline Rowsdower

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #106 on: September 15, 2025, 12:05:53 PM »
I miss being able to buy those in a nice, boxed set right off the shelf.

Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #107 on: September 22, 2025, 02:03:31 PM »
Here's the completed unit of Reiksguard knights:








As you can see I went with a more vivid green for the laurels. I think it plays off the red better than the drab green I tried first.

Here's a close-up of the freehand design I painted on the cloth hanging from the musician's trumpet. Since the Reiksguard are Emperor Karl Franz's personal bodyguard I thought it appropriate to paint the emperor's personal monogram of a stylised K and F on the cloth. The first shot is work in progress. I used a medium grey to trace the letters' basic shape so any mistakes are more easily corrected than if I'd used black right away. As you can see from the photos it was necessary to make a few adjustments to the shape here and there. The monogram is straight from 'Uniforms and Heraldry of the Empire', which is still a great resource. It's actually one of the easier designs I had to choose from because it doesn't require any highlighting or shading nor does it feature perfect geometric shapes like circles or squares. I find these challenging to paint because any mistakes are very easily spotted.



Next up: 10 crossbowmen.

Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #108 on: September 26, 2025, 05:27:20 PM »
Now for those crossbowmen I've been teasing. I want mine to be state troops rather than militia but don't want to use those metal crossbow arms from 5th edition (you know the ones). I've decided to convert them out of the handgunners that came in the 6th edition starter box, of which I have plenty. Here are the first two partially complete.



The crossbows are from the ever-useful militia box. The two biggest difficulties of this conversion are getting the crossbows to line up with handgunners' hands and using green stuff to touch up the areas where I removed handgunner equipment like cartridges and powder horns. The model on the right is a relatively easy conversion because he's using only one hand to handle his handgun/crossbow. I don't want a monopose unit though, so will include at least one of each of the four handgunner poses. Headswaps will hopefully do some extra lifting to make it less obvious how few different models there really are.

I've also been experimenting with magnetic bases and movement trays. This crossbowman has had his base glued to a sheet magnet. He's standing on a movement tray made out of plasticard sandwiched between steel sheet (top) and magnetic sheet (bottom). It works in the sense that I can put this combination inside a cookie tin, handle it very roughly and not have it move a millimetre. Actually removing casualties from the unit is however made hazardous by the strength of the magnets. You have to exert a lot of force, for which you need to grab the model itself rather than the base, and you risk crashing your hand into the other models as you overcome the inertia. Not sure where to go from here. Perhaps I could glue some paper on top of the steel sheet to weaken the bond between the model and the movement tray? Any ideas would be welcome.



If I go ahead with this design, I'll of course also add a plasticard strip along the front and sides to help keep the models in place. I've decided to go with a straight-up goblin green edge rather than something beveled and flocked to match the tops of the models' bases. It's the only right way. 8)

Offline commandant

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #109 on: September 28, 2025, 10:50:43 AM »
I use Green Stuff World magnets as my base with plastic card over them and then the rubber steel as the movement tray with plastic card under it.

I find that if you slide the casualty especially off the base it works well. I haven't thought of using paper over the rubber steel.

Offline Rowsdower

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #110 on: September 28, 2025, 11:37:26 AM »
If you're having trouble getting the models to rank up, then try larger bases

Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #111 on: September 30, 2025, 06:14:15 PM »
I use Green Stuff World magnets as my base with plastic card over them and then the rubber steel as the movement tray with plastic card under it.

I find that if you slide the casualty especially off the base it works well. I haven't thought of using paper over the rubber steel.

Hey thanks! I use Green Stuff World magnets too so maybe it's just a matter of getting used to them.

If you're having trouble getting the models to rank up, then try larger bases

Not a problem so far thankfully although it took some doing with these relatively chunky models.

In the meantime I've done most of the modelling work on my brand new crossbow unit:





Headswaps weren't easily possible on the models that were aiming their handguns, so I opted for two hat swaps instead. The kettle helmets are from the militia box. They look just a bit old fashioned but the feathers help to tie them in with the rest of the unit. I debated converting the drummer out of a handgunner but thought better of it because of the amount of work involved. This one's unfortunately in a marching pose but it's not too noticeable when the unit is ranked up. I can always come back later to replace him if it ends up bothering me.

I'm quite pleased with how they've turned out. Now to do all the gap filling this evening so I can still basecoat them tomorrow, which will be the last dry day for a while here...

Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #112 on: October 03, 2025, 08:52:49 AM »
Quick and dirty paint bench update:



Since I've attached sheet magnets to all the bases I can now use a metal-capped pill bottle as a painting handle. The blue tack I would normally use wasn't really working here because the models' bases are hollow so sandwiching the blue tack between the magnetic sheet and bottle cap risks damaging the magnetic sheet or making it come loose. This new solution has the upside of less clutter on my painting bench with the downside of slightly more model handling every time I move on to the next model in the batch. For the movement tray I've just added plasticard rims on three sides of the 'sandwich' I showed in a previous post. Hopefully it'll be fine in spite of the strength of the magnets. Oh, and is that a wizard on the right there?

I've been really enjoying painting this unit and have been making good progress so far so expect some more news relatively soon!

Offline Rowsdower

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #113 on: October 04, 2025, 07:36:59 AM »
Great job

Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Frippery & Vacillation - an Empire army from Altdorf
« Reply #114 on: October 13, 2025, 07:56:02 AM »
Thanks Rowsdower! I finished the crossbowmen this weekend. Boy is it nice to paint these colours over a white undercoat. I'm happy with how they've turned out, especially the neat look of the movement tray. Unfortunately my phone's camera appears to have eaten a lot of the highlights on the red and blue uniforms. You'll just have to take my word for it that they look better in real life. :)













I've learned a few things from working on this unit. The large surface of the movement tray was too big to paint by hand. I struggled to get a nice even coat of paint on it. Next time I'll use a coloured spray primer. Hopefully I can find a close match for my goblin green. If not, a muted brown would work too. I'll still paint the rims goblin green by hand if necessary because it just completes the look. I'll also endeavour to be tidier with my green stuff and plasticard next time, but that's more of an incremental improvement than a whole new approach.