Uncage the Colours, Unfurl the Flag

So with a bit of a Bowie lyric we kick off a piece about flags that I've been adding to a number of my units over the past couple of days.

Over the pandemic period I have painted up quite a few additional units for my Muslim horde that covers quite a wide range of armies, both planned and morphs. However, a few of them have not had the banners added that I had intended. In addition, there are some units that I have given a bit of a make-over to refresh them, and as part of this I have given them new banners. 

Nearly all the banners are images I've collected from the 'net over the years, some of which I have altered to get what I want. As far as I am aware all are copyright free so I'll share them at the end of this blog post.

So here are a number of pictures of the units now proudly (hopefully) carrying their banners.

First up are two units of Almoravid spearmen - the Lamtuna tribesmen who formed the core of the Almoravid movement and some of the best troops in their armies. Now I have taken a bit of a liberty with these. As far as I can tell the Almoravids used white banners for preference, however, I rather liked the dark red of the image I had so used that. Seems to fit with the overall look of the units as well, I think white would not have looked as nice.

The spearmen themselves are Donnington figures but with shields from Peter Pig's Tuareg range which they kindly supplied as a special order separate from the figures they usually come with.

Next up is a unit of Arab armoured cavalry made up of Legio Heroica figures. I found them in my "to paint" pile and cannot for the life of me remember why I got them. I have quite a few units of this style, but I guess at some point I had a plan for a list and needed the extra unit. Anyway, they paint up nicely and now they have a flag as well.

Then we have a unit of Donnington Turkmen tribesmen - this now makes eight units of Turkmen I have; they are mostly MeG Flexibles, with a couple of Skirmisher only units. They get quite a lot of use in various armies as Turkic types - I rather like them as a troop type. Each unit has a different flag so that I can easily tell which unit is which as they can often have slightly different capabilities; such as some with Skilled shooting and other with Experienced. Helps avoid making mistakes. Hopefully also can assist my opponents.

Now onto some figures that were completed a while ago but have been without flags up until now. These units are all Legio Heroica ghilman/mamluk types for use in armies such as 'Abbasid before the use of horse armour/barding became common. None of the figures I used were designed to be banner-bearers, however, some were carrying their bows in their right hand and it was easy to cut that away, drill out the hand, and add a spear to carry the flag. For these I kept a theme of a basically black banner - very 'Abbasid - and difference them with variously coloured pennants. I rather like how they have turned out.

The last batch are the end product of quite a bit of work. These are six units of mamalik (plural of mamluk) from Donnington that were some of the first figures I painted when I got into MeG and returned to ancient wargaming. They have seen quite a lot of use and were starting to look a bit tired.

So in a fairly major overhaul they were removed from their bases, the paintwork freshened up, new shields added (see later), and then rebased. Adding a banner for each unit is the final part of the process. It has been surprisingly quick and easy to do, and given them a new lease of life. I did consider selling them on eBay and buying the figures again and painting up from scratch, but that would have been a bigger job and I'm pleased I didn't go down that route (although I have with other figures).

I chose to "flag" them as Mamluks as that is what they were originally bought for, although they have seen more use as Rum Seljuqs and Delhi Sultanate than Mamluks. The flags in this case are fairly simple as that is what they actually seem to have been from the sources I've been able to find and the (very) few depictions. They are certainly not the elaborate "Persian carpets" that seem beloved of wargamers - usefully means my army will look rather different from most.

These two units are to be the royal mamalik, the elite of the army. They are somewhat more uniform than the others, all having red horse armour as is recorded in one source.

The next four are the amir's mamalik. Not quite as good but still effective.

As I mentioned the refurbishment involved new shields for all of the mamalik. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly the shields originally supplied were, in my view, a bit on the small size. Despite the fact that these were horse archer troops, they were still capable hand to hand fighters and period illustrations show a reasonably sized shield was carried, usually on the back when not in use. Secondly, it would allow me to improve the look of the figures by using the excellent Little Big Men Studios shield transfers.

Annoyingly I couldn't find separate shields of the size I wanted, so had to get slightly larger ones and then punch them out one by one to get the size that matched the LBMS transfers. That was just under 100 shields - would have been 108 for all the figures, however, I did have a few right sized shields spare already. After punching out and gluing to the figures they then needed filing down a bit as the ones I had bought were a bit too thick and looked ugly. Despite all this it wasn't actually that onerous a job getting them sorted to my satisfaction, and after that it was just punching out all the transfers and sticking them on the shields. Final job on this was, or course, to go and paint the shield rims - something that I've seen a few people fail to do which rather spoils the effect of the LBMS transfers in my opinion.

So here are a couple of close up shots of the shields.

Lastly as promised the image files I used for the flags. As mentioned they are images I have collected over the years and all need resizing before printing - I haven't done that with the basic image so they can be used at different sizes depending on the figures.

I print them out on basic printer paper from a cheap inkjet - HP Envy 6010. I've found that for 15mm figures that I think flags printed out on cheap paper actually look better than those printed on expensive paper by better printers - something about a slight lack of crispness seems to work for my eye at this size.

One thing I always do though, is to paint the edges of the flags to avoid having a white edge that just stands out and ruins the look - unless, of course the flag is white or has a white border. On some I also do a bit of painting on the main part of the flag as well, but usually the printing is enough. Finish with a quick spray of varnish to seal.