25/28mm Revolting Peasants - Miscellanea

 Done! The mud is still drying on the 24 remaining Old Glory peasants, so look for them tomorrow.  But this project is now complete! I'll do the tally in that last post. For now, here are some of the miscellanea I completed this week to help round out the project. 

Since most peasant revolts began at the local village or parish level, when a village mobilized, they often simply went to their local church and took the parish banner to march under. These, I understand, would feature local patron saints, the Virgin Mary, or the Agnus Dei (the Lamb of God). Lamb of God. Some of you know I've been a metalhead since the early '80s and that the album Ashes of the Wake (from the band Lamb of God) is one of my desert island picks. So I get to slip a subtle heavy metal reference into this project. I used ChatGPT to draw up some Agnus Dei-themed banners which were then printed to size and cut out. 

However, this idea occurred to me only after most of the Old Glory Peasants were completed and the rest were primed and ready to go, making them unsuitable for converting. So I had to turn to Victrix to get some suitable bannermen, i.e., peasanty types with very long spears, minimal to no armor, and who could reasonably fit in with the Old Glory models without looking too flashy for these lder style of sculpts. 

For those, I drew from two different packs to get a little variety: the Early Saxon Unarmoured Warriors and the Dark Age Archers and Slingers. Putting it all together, you get these:

I'm not thrilled with the backs of these banners - the blue one especially. I did a nice job carrying on the fringe on the back side of the burgundy one, but I just clumsily highlighted some folds that leave me slightly ashamed. Can we just agree to not notice?

I've also had this three-person set of crude royalty from Fantascenes who are thematically aligned with the peasants, so I thought I'd include them as part of this. That creates some alignment issues, as who would defend these rather disgusting little tyrants? They are slightly beyond contempt. No matter, they have gold and will have to buy their friends and pay for their own sycophancy, I guess. 

These are the only models where I didn't use Army Painter Strong Tone on them, so they'd appear less grimy than their revolting subjects.

Finally, I have the collection of Villagers from the now-defunct Mega Miniatures line. The beggar can join his Reaper Miniatures counterpart pictured a few updates ago. There is a suitably grubby Ratcatcher from this set I may add at a later date, but the rest are more well-to-do and thus ill-fitting for this exercise. 

Finally, a note about how I made the banners: 

First, I superglued some cross beams snipped off some paperclips to the spears. 

Then I glued one end of some thread down. When that dried, I could comfortably lash the crossbeam to the spear diagonally to show it was roped together. Unfortunately, I went at this with too much alacrity and made what looked more like beehives. It did affect how I had to apply the banner, as it made the banner bulge out at the top. To fix this, I didn't trim them exactly to what was printed, but rather lengthened the tabs by a few millimeters to effectively lower the banners further down the pole. I painted over all the white that remained to blend it in with the rest of the fabric. 

ChatGPT assumed I was making a commercial project here and tried to label them accordingly with instructions - lol. I also had to trim off the crossbeam spear tips on The Crucified Lamb, as well as the mutation on the left side of The Lamb of Revelation. Fine. Easy work. 

I'll post up the last of the Old Glory models tomorrow and will try to get a big group shot together too as a capstone. As always, thanks for looking - questions, comments, and followers are welcome and encouraged! I'm doing more and more on Facebook so follow my page there too! https://www.facebook.com/One-of-My-Men-Became-Restless-100659928063858