Baueda Camps and Guns

Baggage & Good In(Tent)ions...

As regular followers of this blog (are there any?) would know, I'm building up a c 1500 Milanese Condotta army for use with DBMM2.

One of the things I thought would be nice is to try and make the bases a little more scenic. So if in doubt, go to Baueda. They make great products, Claudio is a really good guy to deal with, the pricing is good, and service is fast. The only problem is..   I went to their site to order some gabions, (you know, baskets filled with dirt), to put on my artillery bases, and ended up with another 5 packets of stuff I just had to have...

Gabions, pots and sacks, camp-fire set and tents.

I ordered these little beauties on 5 August and they arrived from Europe on 27 August, which is pretty good going. From what I can tell, at least 8 days of that was good old 'Aussie' Post.

For good measure Claudio threw in free samples from the Hostis range. (Thanks Claudio!)This seems to be a foot Goth, (he will have to be painted with white skin, black clothing and lipstick..) a mounted Goth, and three poses of Norman foot, which seem to be dismounted knights.

These haven't yet been cleaned up but look like very nice castings, with nice undercut detail and should paint up very nicely. The dismounted knights would do very nicely for the First Crusade too, when many were forced to fight on foot after the loss of their horses.

I have checked the Baueda website, and I can't see these precise figures under any of their existing ranges, so I am guessing they form an extension to the Norman range, and the Goths a new variety of scruffy Germanics.

A word of warning though; these figures are genuine 15mm and will look very undersized compared to some of the heroic specimens out there. If anyone is genuinely interested, just comment, and I will put some Essex Normans and Lancashire Goths up for comparison.

Preparation

I like to drill out the tops of the tents (as you can see below I have three varieties - 15MDV, 15MDV-b and 15RNS).

This will allow me to add large banners to the tents, which just makes everything look better. For the parsimonious, not gluing the banners in will allow you to have interchangeable flags/banners for every army. If you do this though, make sure you keep the tent colours pretty generic.  

Pin Vice works out....

Next step, simple wood-glue (PVA) onto pre-cut bases (Olympian Games). Once on their bases I will add various shields, bags, boxes to add interest and variety to the scene, then undercoat with cheap spray car-primer white. Camp Guard figures get painted separately and added when basing is done.

And here's the real reason the Baueda order went in, in the first place, late 15th or early 16th century field artillery, behind gabions. 

As you can see in the background, you get a a sheet of 16 gabions, and these are easily clipped/broken out of the sheet. The guns will be painted separately, as will the five crew and various cannon-balls, and sacks and boxes from Baudea set LGS2.  They should look suitably busy, colourful and varied.