Next stage for the Venetians was to fill in all the peripheral bits and pieces needed to actually play the game, including casualty markers and heroes.

I wanted some nice casualty markers, but didn’t want to go to all the trouble of building and painting actual figures. My Romans have a set of markers, kindly donated by friend Peter, which consist of a Roman shield mounted on a single-figure base, so I decided to mimic that for the Venetians.

Regular visitors will know that I am ujsing Perry plastics, whose various sprues include pavises: the stand-alone shields used by crossbowmen for shelter whilst they reload. These looked ideal, so I cut enough off the sprues and sprayed them with a white undercoat.

Next I bought some pavise-shaped transfers specifically designed for the Perry pavises from Little Big Man Studios (an excellent company, by the way: highly recommended) which were really, really easy to mount. Finally, a quick scoot round the edges with some brown Contrast paint and each pavise-marker was now ready.

The bases are 2p coins with a light coating of basing material and then flock and the finished pavises glued on top.

Experts amongst you will have spotted that the pavise transfers are actually in Burgundian colours (all that was available) but actually the red and yellow works very well with the colour scheme I’ve adopted for the Venetians, so I’m very happy with these: I just hope I don’t have to use them very much!

The heroes are just standard cavalrymen but using some of the fancy heads that the Perry’s kindly provide. These really are lovely figures and, again, highly recommended for those seeking to build some kind of late medieval army.