Horsies!

 It's time to go back to the Bretonnian project for a bit. If reading about knights isn't your thing, skip the next chunk of text (or possibly this whole post).

There have been three Bretonnian army books, if you count the recent one for The Old World (and why wouldn't you, really?). The first was released in 1996, and was written by Nigel Stillman. Stillman doesn't get much mention these days, but he was a fairly big figure in the old days of White Dwarf. The second, by Anthony Reynolds, came out in 2003. I've got both, and I think the Stillman Codex (which sounds like the title of a Dan Brown novel) is the better of the two.

The Stillman book actually makes Bretonnia look like fun. In fact, it seems to be a cartoon medieval kingdom, where jolly peasants quaff wine and brightly-coloured knights fall off their horses a lot. There are references to stuffing cheese in your ears to avoid annoying minstrels, and to something called "the Great Flapping Monster of Chateau Mal" (as slain by Bertrand le Brigand, who in no way resembles Errol Flynn's Robin Hood). It actually sounds like a place you might want to visit. It also gave the Bretonnians an Arthurian feel, introducing the Lady of the Lake and the Green Knight, and provided rules for special formations and divine protection. These did a lot to move Bretonnia away from the "Empire without the fun stuff" feel that had dogged it in the past.

And that's the time that I'm looking to recreate with my army.

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After all that, I've painted my first unit of knights for about 30 years. These guys aren't even Bretonnians, technically: they're from a game called Battlemasters, which Games Workshop released with MB Games back in 1992. I remember looking at the pictures of the knights in White Dwarf with my friend Jim when we were at school.

Obviously, they're all the same sculpt, which isn't brilliant but isn't bad either, especially for a board game about 30 years old. I've used these as a bit of a test unit, trying out a variety of colours and block patterns for later units. The early Bretonnian knights had a wider range of colours and less ornate detail than the current miniatures, and I don't think they suffered for it.

After painting harlequins and Escher gangers, I was expecting these to be very fiddly. In fact, the main challenge is keeping the different sections looking cleanly defined and shading the big sheets of cloth without having an airbrush. It wasn't easy. The overall effect reminds me of those 1950s films about Camelot (it is a silly place) shot in Glorious Technicolor: very bright and slightly hallucinatory. I like them. I might even paint some official Bretonnians soon.