There were a small number of Landsknecht figures in the Renaissance Range:
R1s Landsknecht Pikeman Advancing
R2s Landsknecht Halberdier Advancing
R3s Landsknecht Musketeer Firing
R4s Landsknecht Two Handed Swordsman
R5s Armoured Landsknecht Pikeman Advancing
R12s Armoured Landsknecht Officer
which gave you all the infantry types you needed.
I'd had odds and ends for a while then I acquired a larger batch at the beginning of this year so I spent a month or so getting them painted up to a similar standard. There were no artillery so rather than trying to convert some of the figures I had to gunners I took advantage of the rather nice Imperial-Modellbau figures available from the Hagen Miniatures on line shop to provide artillery and a command group.
Landsknechts qualify as "complicated" for painting as far as I am concerned, along with tratan, hussars etc so I go for an impressionistic approach to provide a just about acceptable result from a distance.
I have accidentally ended up then with a useful sized and very flexible force which can serve as part of any number of armies of the period. And then there is that very staisfying feeling of having "finished" a project.
There is an officer figure in the front rank of the second unit of pikemen (four pictures above) which I haven't been able to track down on a list: I do have this old catalogue photo of R12s (armoured officer) but I haven't got or seen this figure in the metal.
2 comments:
Is the Officer perhaps a Warrior? Or a converted S Ranger?
I remember the Landsknechts coming out from Minifigs. Most impressive at the time, though the pijes were a bit yfty. Neville decided that thinner pije were too vulnerable . Were there suitable cavalry? I can remember a reiter figure , but he was from 1560 -80 whereas the Landsknechts were from 1510-20 .
I go with your impressionistic painting. Lansknechts can be done brilliantly on an individual basis ( the old Ral Partha figures were terrific sculpts) but en masse they easily look a visual mess, so it suits better to have the unit painted for ffect as a unit. Aiding that quite a lot of the troops in oeriod are shown as in 'uniform', the French king's Swiss, for example, being in red and yellow stripes. I wonder too if fashion and the mass provision of cloth might not have created some unifirmity. Slashing the clothes and pulling through the shirt, which the early landsknechts did will have resulted in quite a lit if red, yellow, blue, slashed white. Only later did they design in the slashing.
Great to see these okd boys marching again to 'Hut dich baur I Komm or whatever Look out here I come is in Renaissance German.
Roy
Roy, I’m pretty sure it is an unlisted S Range figure, the base suggests this more than Warrior. I spent a lot of time looking at the photos in the George Gush Renaissance Armies book, the one based on his Airfix Magazine series, and there is a good photo of the Warrior Lansknechts in the last chapter. There are Reiter and Lancer figures in the Renaissance S Range and more choice under the TYW range if you want to go a bit later. Warrior did Gendarmes and Demilances (again, photos in the Gush book)
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