Conversions for "Malta"



I see this fellow as leading a band of Barbary Corsairs out of Tunis or Algiers.



Another Perry Mahdist figure, this time with a "By Fire & Sword" flag as supplied with their 15mm Ottoman Turkish sets. I made a hash of sticking it round the pole straight, so had to try and blend the edges to hide the white glare. Can you tell?

This one started life as a Perry Zouave I got free with WI magazine several months back. The head is from the Mahdists set.

The shield is a drawing pin, with the pin cut down and the whole thing stuck into a pre-drilled hole in his back. IA tip for the crescents for anyone who wants to try - find a small, round thing of some description, hold it on the flag, paint gently round three-quarters of the circumference and then fill in the middle bit. This is the only way I could have painted these quite so neatly short of using transfers!

Another Mahdist with a Turkish-inspired flag. Stars, stripes, crescents - all suitable material for Moslem flags

 

And this one will lead a bunch of fanatics in the assault on the Christian lines. Another Mahdist, his right hand simply drilled through to accept a brass wire spear. The falg is again a computer label.

It is not necessarily one of the stranger quirks of being a wargamer, but surely most of us risk the structural integrity of our humble abode with not a care by constantly buying more and more for our respective lead mountains. Reaching ever upwards towards the heavens as we pile more and more new offerings on the pyre of unpainted, anatomical loveliness, the mountain never grows smaller for long, no matter how long we quarry with size 1 sable and acrylic medium. Even wholesale clearouts of supposedly unwanted aspects of the mountain are only of partial help, as the regenerative powers of our personal edifice see growth renewed in short order.

What is perhaps rather quirky, however, especially in wargamers like me who spend a fair amount each year on new stuff we know we will get around too soon (...), is the desire to not just buy more, but convert so we not only have more but we have that something unique. We may not be good at conversions, but we do it anyway. We may be able to buy something very much like what we end up building, but we cut and carve away, stick on non-standard parts and still head off with more hope than skill to achieve that somethign different.

So here we have some of my recent efforts, all built from Perry-originating plastics, built simply to satusfy a desire to provide somethign a little different.

G