Slitherine

Hi All,

I'm in the middle of a War of the Roses (Yorkist Pretender) army, and am enjoying a 'do it yourself' feel about livery colours and indeed painting things how I feel like.

This led me to think 'how far away from history can we go?'

Hollywood these days gets a lot of 'bad press' when it does something unhistorical. "90 minutes into the movie I saw a stirrup. I had to leave even though I was enjoying the movie up until that point (Gladiator)" and "I loved it, including the war Rhinoceros (300)" being two extremes of 'acceptance of the lack of historical accuracy'.

So, how about it?

I would say that I was tempted to answer 1, not because I am that strict with being historical, but I find very appealing doing my own transformations based on historical findings. I guess it is a similar feeling to the sculptor finishing her model after doing a thoughtful research. In the other hand, there are limits to what you have to demand yourself: this is a hobby, thus about having fun!

Since we are short of eye witnesses if it looks right who's to dispute it.

philqw78 wrote:Since we are short of eye witnesses if it looks right who's to dispute it.

Not mention that many of us like to play a variety of armies but don't have unlimited money and time to represent the exact figures all the time.

philqw78 wrote:Since we are short of eye witnesses if it looks right who's to dispute it.

I guess in many ways 'that is the question'. Often people will know nuances of history that can affect the 'authenticity' of a paint job.

I see it all the time in the 'critiques' of movies. I recently saw "Kingdom of Heaven" again, and whilst there are some rather glaring historical anachronisms in that movie, there are some that are less glaring - yet get picked up by the student of history.

As another example, I always though that 'green' would be a fairly universal and cheap dye, and so used a lot of it in my earlier barbarian armies. Apparently (I've been told, so I might be wrong) green is a rather 'rich' dye as green vegetable dyes don't hold very well and end up going brown. To 'fix' the dye they have to use different chemicals. So, there are other vegetable dyes that fix quite well on their own of other colours.

So, someone paints up their 'cheap peasants' green, and in fact they have painted a 'rich' dye.

As I said, I don't know of the accuracy of that statement, but there would be other examples. A student of historical dyes would be able to better tell us, but sometimes Phil's comment will be right, but sometimes it will be wrong too. "There are no eye witnesses to say that peasants didn't run around in green dyed clothing" - this is true, but if indeed it is true that they were difficult to fix, then it is probably unlikely.

Personally, I think it doesn't matter that much, but just wondering where others come from...

shadowdragon wrote:Not mention that many of us like to play a variety of armies but don't have unlimited money and time to represent the exact figures all the time.

Oh, I think it's different using 'wrong figures' to represent different armies. I've used my Vikings as Huguenot French for FoG:R just because they were the only figures I had available, but if I was painting up a Huguenot army I wouldn't Viking figures.

I wouldn't care if someone turned up with his 'Crusader' army in Gothic plate, but I wouldn't build one that way. Having said that, if I ever get around to building a Samurai army it will definitely have Sashimono.

So, I guess the question is about the 'building an army' not - substitution of figures because you don't want to build an army for a particular period.