This past weekend I started working on my entry for the
Saga Thorsday painting contest announced in their most recent video. I'm still working on more units for my Crusades Eastern Princes army. I want another unit of crossbowmen and another unit of warriors to round out the force. I previously painted up a unit of
City Militia Crossbowmen from Gripping Beast. The figures are nice but with only four poses and twelve figures per unit, I didn't really want a second unit of the same figures. Instead I decided to try my hand at converting some of the
Fireforge City Militia Archer figures to crossbowmen using green stuff and Gripping Beast loose crossbows. This image, is the obligatory pre-start photo as requested by Rodge. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment, as the contest requires painting of one point of Saga and of course I pick militia figures - the largest unit.
Here's the photo from the Fireforge of the figures 'out of the box'. They come in five parts: body & legs, head, bow arm, draw arm and quiver. The figures are made of semi-hard resin that did have some bubbles in it. The most challenging part of the conversion would be the draw arms which are all the same and in an awkward pose that isn't all that anatomically correct. With some liberal application of heat from a heat gun, some of the bow arms were bent and twisted. Others were cut, re-positioned, pinned and glued, and in a few cases completely re-built with green stuff. All of the quivers were cut down to a smaller length to account for crossbow bolts being shorter. I chose to leave the feather flights on the arrows in the quivers. They're not historically correct, but there's no good way to change the flights on them to wooden veins. Plus the Gripping Beast figures I have also show feathers on the bolts. I guess the composition of medieval crossbow bolts isn't common knowledge?
Here's a group shot of the unit before priming. Priming did reveal some additional areas that required more sanding and clean up, but nothing too major.
Additional close-ups of the figures prior to priming are shown below. Expect another update on this project soon, as I need to finish these before the next Saga Thorsday episode! Extra bonus points if I get them done in time for this weekend's Saga game day at our club!
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4 comments:
They should be great to paint. They've a lot of raised detail, so should paint easy?
It wasn't until I re-read your post that I realized that you had converted these from bows to crossbows: wow--nice work!
As far as the resin/plastic vs metals, I hear ya.
It's hard to believe I'm four and a half hours into the project at this point and what I have is figures ready to prime!
Not a fan of fireforge, but they do look good!
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