New Painting Project: Carolingians for Saga

    The first batch of my 28mm Carolingian army -- Charlemagne's Franks

I'd been planning to get started on these guys for awhile, but had been putting them off to finish a few miscellaneous batches of Dark Ages figures. The intermission is over, though, and it is time to begin painting a new Saga army. The core of my Carolingian army is a 4-point Gripping Beast starter box. The box contains no bow-armed warriors, though, and my planned build calls for two unit's worth of them. Luckily, I have a lot of miscellaneous 28mm Dark Age archers in my unpainted bin. I sorted out 16 suitable looking figures and added them to my round metal tin where I'd dumped the Gripping Box figs into.

    Closeup of two of the riders showing the two-tone helmets and the iron scale armor

Where to start, though? I like to paint in batches of 6-8 figures, but a batch of 8 mounted is simply too large for my sakes. So, I broke the box's 8 troopers into two batches of four. Interestingly, exactly half of the riders are wearing scale armor and the other half chainmail. I chose to paint the scale armored guys, since it would be a change of pace. I did some research trying to decide whether the scales would be bronze or iron/steel. I saw images of both online, and ended up deciding to go with iron/steel. However, I remembered from my 15mm Ancients days how much I liked the look of Republican Roman legionaries who had bronze helmets but steel chainmail. I decided to recapture some of that look by painting their helmets as a bronze bowl with steel reinforcing sections.

    My dappled gray and brindle brown horses, taken from the online horse coloring guide I'd found

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Lately, for mounted figures I have been actually epoxying the figure to the horse before priming them. And I begin my painting with the horses, finishing them completely before starting on the riders. So, I looked at my chart of horse colorings that I'd found online and picked out four to paint. The chart is kind of cartoonish, but that's not really that bad of a thing considering we are doing a miniature adaption of horse colors. I picked out a nice looking one I'd never done before - brownish "brindle" color (yep, like dogs!), a really nice red bay, a dappled, gray "Chubari Spots," and a lighter brown "Red Dun." I have found that I like how my horses come out so much better since I started actually researching horse colorings online!

    The brighter colored noble cavalry of the Carolingian army in their red & green coloring

For the riders, I went with brighter colors than I would normally do otherwise for Dark Ages figures. These are the hearthguard -- the wealthiest of the warriors -- and should look the part of upper class Franks. Two of them had cloaks, which I painted a Yew Green and faded Red. Monty and Rodge of Saga Thorsday fame talk a lot about a common coloring system running through their excellently painted armies. For irregular Dark Age folks, that's not something I have done. However, with the Carolingians, we see the beginnings of a more professional army. So, I have decided that red and green will be the common colors running through the warband. By no means will every figure be in those colors. Instead, I will just shoot for more reds and greens than the others. For example, one of these riders is in blue, two in green, and the third is the faded red.

I lined their tunics and cloaks in contrasting colors and gave them suitably Frankish looking shields, I felt. I keep telling myself that "next" army I will follow the crowd and give shield decals a try. I have never successfully been able to use them, though I admit the only time I tried was long ago and in 15mm. So, for now, I will continue to hand-paint my shield designs. When flocking the figures, I decided I would do another "common look" bit to tie the army together (as Monty and Rodge would say). I'm going to put flower tufts on the bases of this army. I actually decided that as I was finishing up when I thought the bases looked a little plain. I'd put rocks and pebbles on the Moorish cavalry bases, so I thought I'd give the Carolingians a bouquet of flowers or two!

Hope you guys like them -- feel free to leave comments below (or follow my blog - it has pitifully few followers...ha, ha!). Next up? A point of Frankish infantry warriors! I actually just put the base coat on their tunics tonight, so who knows? Maybe they will follow these guys onto the field relatively quickly.