Dark Ages - Anglo-Saxon Earls and Flemish Mercenaries

These figures are from Gripping Beast - the Anglo-Saxon historical figure Hereward the Wake, a unit of Flemish Mercenaries (a heavily-armoured Warrior unit choice) and another gentleman that I decided to use as a potential leader too - he's from the Welsh Teulu pack from GB and is a lovely sculpt.

I decided that I was going to paint them in the same sort of scheme - the plan being that the characters are father and son and the unit is their personal bodyguard. In SAGA I'd be using the Flemish Mercenaries as Hearthguard - I think they look suitably well-off and hardcore. The Mercenaries had the "open hand" that lots of historical figures come with - I generally very much dislike the look of this when the weapon options don't look properly gripped. With these, I removed the open hands and replaced them with suitable plastics from the GB range - I pinned them into place to make sure they wouldn't snap off in a slight breeze. The shields were part of the casts.

Not much in the way of changes to the base figures - Hereward's shield was originally the classic round shield, so I gave him a kite shield to fit with the rest of his bodyguard. This is probably historically inaccurate, but I'm pleased with the outcome! The colour scheme is probably inaccurate too (the uniform-look) but I wanted it to be easy to distinguish between these and the less professional soldiers in the army. 

Here's a close up on the shields that I've painted - I stuck to some pretty simple designs and added weathering.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - many thanks for reading!