Humble Beginnings - The Muscotives are gathering forces!

Today I´m going to show you my first results in building my Muscovite Forces, as promised in my last post.

The core of the force so far is formed by a pike and shot infantry unit. The miniatures were made all by me - my first attempts to do 15mm models - in one of my earlier attempts to start a force. Unfortunately I soon realised that this kind of formation is not suitable to field a quickly playable skirmish force, as these are either cavalry or dragoons, not pike and shot units.

Later, I laid my hands on some cheap cavalrymen that I found suitable to represent Russian Traditional Noble Cavalry - even if not historically accurate, these riders at least give the right feeling and impression.  Here they are, painted up, representing some Boyar Sons Cavalry bases:

Some interesting features that you might not discover on first glance:


Some of the figures are painted using Non-Metallic Metal Techniques, others are painted with metallic paints.  Challenge: Can you identify which are which?  ;)

The banners are entirely scratch-built, using some deformed hard plastic blister packaging (I believe regular PET) that I glued on the spears. The Muscovite Flag is freehand painting, heavily abstracted.

I hope the cataphractoi will not be that prominent later on when they are hidden among more regular horses in a full unit. As outlined in my last post, I´m planning on creating my own Riders on some AB horses that are on their way to me.


Here´s the pike and shot unit mentioned earlier.  I´ll be using the musketeers to supplement the dismounted dragoons so my earlier work on these figures is not completely wasted until I´m able to play larger games.

And now that these are done, I´m working on the next base of Dragoons using the same base figures as in the regiment above with some conversions to create more unique figures:

I´m also preparing new masters to have some more infantry variety - more poses especially. But more on that later, when I get my dollies and muskets cast.

Having access to moldmaking and casting facilities really helps to make this project much more time-efficient at little additional cost.

More is coming soon, I got some artillery in preparation (again I unit that I´ll not use very soon, but felt like doing) an will be painting the new Dragoons soon.  When I´m done with that, my horses will have arrived, I hope.