Kingdom of Strathclyde warband

      "The heroes went to Cattraeth in marshalled array, and with shout of war,

      With powerful steeds, and dark brown harness, and with shields,
      With uplifted javelins, and piercing lances,
      With glittering mail, and with swords."

                                                                                                                 - Y Gododin

This is what I've been up to since the start of lockdown. 33 dark age cavalry to comprise a complete six point warband for SAGA. All figures are Gripping Beast. I already owned a metal mounted warlord and four mounted Teulu for my Welsh, but they were mounted on the smaller welsh cobs. For the rest of the warband I used three of GB's plastic Dark Age warriors boxes which come with modern horses. Unwilling to have my warlord and his hearthguard ride into battle on ponies while his warriors spurred on their chargers I felt a little mount swap was required. I was sad to lose the accuracy, but worth it for a unified warband. They didn't fit very well and needed their legs splaying into position in an operation that looked extremely uncomfortable, but I think they're in a place where they don't look too out of place with the others.

I tried a few new things on these. For the horses, I removed a step of highlighting. The reigns didn't get highlighted at all.This was in the interest of speed. I've always worried too much about getting things looking just right, and actually what I want is models on the table, not painting awards, so I'm continuing to cut back on things like this. Other shortcuts included using a citadel contrast paint for the flesh, which saved a lot of time, and not following the contours of the model but applying a loose zenithal highlighting technique (but without all the messing about with two types of primer). I think the individual models don't look as highly worked, but en-masse they look really good. This is something I am hoping to carry over into my next project (Saxons) but the Victrix models are more detailed than these fellows, so we'll see how it turns out.

Shields and banners are LBMS, tufts from Tajima1. The things that took so long on these were the spears. I am tired of plastic spears breaking, and they have a tendency to look like tree trunks on the Gripping Beast plastics, so each of these got his spear cut off and a hole drilled to take a wire spear. Again, I think this improves the look an awful lot, but I did get somewhat fed up of piercing my thumb tip with a tiny drill piece!

The bases were also an experiment. I have been struggling to get my bases looking the way I want, so after looking at a lot of images of bases that I admire online, I decided to cut out the flock and the static grass, and just opted for a range of tufts. Key to making this work was the 2mm tufts, which give scale, contrast, and structure to the larger tufts. In future I will lay in a bigger stock of 2mm tufts because I still felt there were too many of the larger sized tufts here. I also experimented with using cat litter to represent stones and gravel. A marvellous, if curious, choice. Again, I will be using this material as my go-to technique in future.

These chaps will be organised into three units of warriors and two units of hearthguard. in SAGA Strathclyde levy cannot be mounted and must carry javelins, not bows, which sacrifice a lot of range. I'm not keen, therefore, on having a foot element to this warband, especially as they can activate the whole warband using just two SAGA die. I have enough spare models to round out the two units of hearthguard into warrior units, but I don't have enough space in my storage foam for another 8, so I'll see how they fare on the battlefield before buying more storage. 

I also hope to use these in various guises in Hail Caesar, or other larger games as well. It has already been pointed out that I am well on my way to having enough for Gododdin, but I'm not convinced my thumb could cope with being pierced another 257 times for a 1:1 recreation.

I'll leave you with another couple of photos of the whole lot. I'm glad these have turned out better than the Germans in the last post. I was starting to fear that I had lost the touch!