Miniature Painting: The Greenwood Gang

Two years ago, in September 2018, I took up miniature painting. You can see my first fumbling efforts here, and my very-slightly-less-fumbling second efforts here.

Since then I have continued, in an extremely unsystematic way, to collect and paint miniatures. The pandemic has meant that I haven't actually done any miniature-based gaming, but painting tiny plastic goblins has proven to be a very calming activity in these uncertain times. One of my students recently confessed that she spent her spare time assembling Gundams because it was 'meditative'. I knew exactly what she meant.

The Greenwood Gang are a good example of my haphazard approach to the hobby. A couple of years ago I bought a sprue of Dark Ages archers and painted them in green and brown, with the idea that maybe they were hunters or foresters and would thus be wearing clothes to camouflage with the woods in which they moved. From then on, every time I got a figure or two with a vaguely 'medieval outlaw' air to them, I painted them in the same colours. And so, gradually, the Greenwood Gang grew from a band of four archers to a force of thirty-nine, including everything from board game figures, to old-fashioned metal models, to modern plastics. They were painted at intervals over the last two years: some of them were painted when I was still learning and had almost nothing in the way of paints and basing materials, while others were completed much more recently. I rather like the motley appearance this gives them, even if the historian in me can't help noticing that some of them really don't belong within about five hundred years of each other.

Anyway. Here they are. There's got to be some wargame out there in which they'd count as a rules-legal force...