Here’s everyone busy playing IABSM left right and centre, and all I can find the time for is to paint and build a little bit of terrain!

As regular visitors will know, I’m currently putting together English Civil War forces to use with For King & Parliament. I’ve already finished enough standard troops to play one side of the sample scenario in the rulebook, the Battle of Montgomery, but hadn’t had the chance to complete any command figures. Until now, that is, so here is the first command stand: Colonel-level, so two figures.

These are 15mm Essex figures. I’m using Peter Pig for the troops, Essex for the command stands, and mostly GW Contrast paints to, er, paint them with.

Nice figures, although I couldn’t quite work out what the thing the Colonel himself was wearing on his chest. I’ve painted it as a sort of yellow/gold braid effect on top of a red waistcoat, but now I note that the painted version on the Essex site has it as a sort of chainmail vest. No matter: at three foot away, what’s the difference!

I also needed some buildings to represent a village in the second scenario I want to play, so found these rather spectacular “Timber-Framed Houses” from 4ground Publishing.

These come in the usual flat-pack format, but are relatively easy to build: I did all four in a single evening. They are also very tolerant of idiots: you can’t see it, but I completely mucked up one build and, as I idiotically use Superglue when putting things like this together, trying to fix any mistakes can be…testing, shall we say. Despite my cackhandedness, I think you have to agree how good they look, and that’s straight from the packet: I’m sure that better modellers than I can customize them to look even better.

Anyway, that’s four lovely houses done and dusted. Price for all four was £47 plus postage: which I think is a fair price considering I now have all the buildings I need for a 2-4 square FK&P town.

Here’s a close-up of one of the timber-framed cottages: