Art De La Guerre

[madaxeman]

I'd seen and heard a lot about the new Wiglaf Miniatures range from Dan Mersey, the rules author of several Dark Ages era games.

The range is nominally for The Age of Penda, designed for the wars of the seventh century AD Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and their enemies and is sculpted by Mark Copplestone, but with more than enough Viking/Saxon/Norman etc figures in my collection already to field a substantial European civil war, never mind a single army I'd been dithering for a while whether to pick some up mainly for comparison purposes.

Then, on Instagram, Dan popped up and said he has some sample bags available, so a quick Paypal transaction later and I soon had a set of 7 of the guys to have a go at painting them up.



As you can see they are sharply cast models, nicely animated and with some non-generic poses. The figures with spears have been cast with open hands, which is always good now that so many of us have cottoned onto the idea of using wire spears or plastic broom bristles !



And here they are painted up and based - I did a kind of slap-chop approach on them in the main, with black undercoat and white drybrushing to give highlights to the paint, but with so much chainmail there's still a lot of drybrushed gunmetal on black anyway. To be fair they aren't as well painted as I hoped - there's only so much you can do with Dark Age figures if you aren't Steve Dean (who does the official images for Wiglaf)



The big question with any new range of figures like these is "how do they compare to Essex?", so with that in mind here are the Wiglaf guys next to some Essex Feudal East European spearmen. I think this pretty much nails the "are they really the 18mm they are marketed as?" debate with a resounding "yes".

There's more of these photos and comparisons on the full article on my Blog at https://madaxemandotcom.blogspot.com/2023/03/wiglaf-dark-ages-18mm-figures.html
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www.madaxeman.com

[Three]

For what it's worth, I have some of these truly excellent figures.
In terms of figure size comparison, they are definitely 18mm, however I found they match very well with Forged in Battle Armoured Saxon raiders pack GX05 (but only this pack, they dwarf just about everything else).
The FiB from this pack are also excellent castings. I've quite happily mixed them on the same base.