From the start, I’ve said that a side effect of this project could be that it gets my cogs whirring for more minis based on one we’ve made for this – be it another mini, a whole range, some chums, or even just a style or era. It’s another reason that nominating people to be chosen is so important – even if they don’t “win”, I’m now aware of them, and they might creep into my subconscious enough that I decide to make them outside of the project anyway, as a standard release.
Well I got so into researching Jeanne d’Arc ,that when it came to designing her pennon, I decided to commit to making a battle standard for horseback version as well and then – time to make the mini!
Jeanne d’Arc by Bad Squiddo Games. Sculpted by Alan Marsh, painted by John Morris, banner art by Martin Whitmore and photo backdrop by Jon Hodgson.
Isn’t it stunning? The banner pole was said to be 18 feet tall, which is HUGE, and I tried it to scale, and it was so tall that I chose to shorten it in our version to look more “right” as, of course, 28mm isn’t a “proper” scale as such. The flags are scaled to each other as they are the same width, and this “looks right”.
As with the smaller flag, the pennon, you get two of each – in case you mess one up or need a spare for an objective – and instructions. I am SO please how well it’s all turned out!
Something which can cause weakness in mounted minis with poles is the one tiny join to the hand – but we solved this….with…. HISTORY! She has a special saddle called a “selle de bannière” or the “banner saddle”, which has a holster to pop it in to help carry the weight of it all. I can’t imagine riding a horse and carrying that thing, even with a support, which adds even more to how impressive Jeanne was. We have of course given 28mm Jeanne one of these saddles which helps her carry it, and also gives us another contact point – hooray! Thank you, history!
The Mounted Jeanne d’Arc is available now by herself or with the foot version if you haven’t got that yet – both here.
The famous “Jeanne d’Arc confronts Turkey Man” scene from history.
Where are the next three minis?
They’ve been delayed by EVERYTHING going on at once, but I have managed to clear some backlog of far more boring tasks so it’s now #1 priority. I underestimated how much time and energy that Salute and UK Games Expo – our two major shows in April and June – would take. Me underestimating time and energy for tasks is always a given though, I should know this by now (if I wasn’t busy underestimating)
I’m aiming to have the research and sketches all up and in the hands of the sculptor by the end of next week, hopefully sooner (but there’s always curveballs)
Thanks for sticking around, we haven’t done the full relaunch yet either, so there’s that to come too!
Hooray, out they go to you all! This means that Ada Lovelace, Jeanne d’Arc, Audrey Hepburn and Mary Fields are now in the shop, available to order as standard, for those late to the party or prefer not to pre order. You can get them here. There are still collector’s versions of them all as well, so not too late for that!
You know you’ll get the special card if the listing says “Collector’s Edition”.
Look at them all! I hadn’t realised quite how many there were until I spent ALL OF SATURDAY packing them! Brilliant, thank you!
I’m really looking forward to the next part of this project!
Wave 3 will be after Salute. Salute is a massive trade show we…..trade at, on the 13th of April, so it’s currently full steam ahead preparing for it, and I’m taking a week off afterwards! THEN the designing of Mary Read, Anne Bonny and Olga of Kiev will begin.
Minis 1-10 will be available on the racks at Salute! Squeeee! And hopefully I’ll get some leaflets together to link to this blog and spread the good word!
This is one of the tasks as I was dreading as I knew it would be fiddly, but I actually gained great satisfaction from it! I had the dimensions of the pennon and my mock up with the Danny Devito, but it’s not something you can really math. This is because wargaming figures aren’t true scale, so sometimes you need to make things a bit bigger or smaller to help the overall effect.
I had a starting point, and then printed off a whole bunch of banners in very similar sizes, playing around til I had what I felt to be right. I then consulted with some chums (Thanks Louis, Jon and John!) and went a fraction smaller. This is both “close enough” to the documented reality and “cool enough” to show off on the battlefield I mean tabletop. Also, I had to figure out how long to cut the spear, as the one provided is very long (There are smaller ones we can use but they’re much thinner, like a fine sewing needle!). The spear is 100mm long and I decided that around 65mm from tip to tip works well, though you can go a bit longer or shorter if you wish.
The pennon will be full colour, we only have a black and white printer at the office so that’s what all my tests are in.
To clip the wires I recommend stronger clippers than usual, not the standard hobby clippers. Personally, I use the Xuron 2193 Wire Shear Cutters. There is no affiliation or anything, just the ones that work for me! If you haven’t got suitable clippers yet I definitely recommend picking up something like these, as they come in handy for all the wire spears you’ll ever encounter! They cut so easy too! And aren’t a huge expense. Much better than thinking “ah my usual clippers will work” and then having to replace those, AND buy strong wire clippers. Ahem. Like some, folk, that aren’t erm, me.
Once the size was decided on, the next query was the paper type, and thickness. I was tempted to go with matt as the real banner would be fabric, but then the print wouldn’t be as optimised as say, silk. Silk is always my favourite! I cut out the size of the flag using one of my packaging inserts, which are 150gsm silk. I didn’t glue it perfectly as I was just messing around, but it worked pretty well. It has a nice quality feel and holds the “wiggle” shape well. It needed to be slightly thinner, so I finally have ordered in 130gsm.
I use a variety of print companies, this time I went for some next day online company, so that I can check it all out tomorrow and start getting cracking on with these.
The final task was filling in the rest of the sheet that the pennon comes on. Seen as I am so.. as we say in the UK “cack-handed”, I decided that everybody would get TWO copies of the pennon – JUST IN CASE.
Not that it’s any more difficult than other banners, but I imagine it would be a right bummer to make a mistake the first time around, like getting the glue stuck wrong or dropping it in your cup of tea! It doesn’t cost us any more to do this, so why not? It means you get have to a “practice go”.
It does mean that there is less space for instructions but hey, who needs those? (me- I do!) I crammed them in! Mostly top tips! So here is a sample of everything you get (PLUS the Collectable Card if you’re in the first 100). And all for just £5. The Community Minis are price locked at £5 for the first hundred and may increase after that, so now is totally a good time to snag your Jeanne!
Metal photographs so bad! This is a rough early test cast but she does the job for my scaling!
Now I’ve ordered these, it’ll be exciting to see tomorrow how they have came out! I’ll do a test with one of my plain spears, and then brave adding the flag to the expertly painted John Morris copy that I have….EEEEEP.
I’ve been staring at flags and spears all day to the point they don’t look real any more, so it’s time to have a stretch and tidy the office I think!
We’ve made some huge progress on Wave 2 of the Community Miniatures! It’s been an exceptionally busy year so far, but I’m very glad we’ve been making some good strides – not as soon as I would have preferred, but still happy things are happening.
They’ve been painted! Yay! Thank you to John Morris (Mary, Audrey, Joan) and Jennie Ruskin (Ada) for these wonderful paint jobs.
These are not the final pics! I haven’t photographed them myself yet, these are the ones sent in by the painters, but I’ll have them all in hand tomorrow to do this.
I wanted to show you an update sooner rather than later though, as sometimes I blink and a strange amount of time has passed.
L-R: Audrey Hepburn, Jeanne d’Arc, Ada Lovelace, Mary Fields
Don’t they look so wonderful!
The deal with Jeanne’s flag
What’s the deal? Well, I don’t have a full photo yet, but I will soon! She comes with an open hand, a printed flag, and a wire spear. The flag will be mirrored, so you can wrap it around the pole and secure it with a glue stick, making it double-sided. It can then be bent a bit to show it wiggling in the wind.
Thank you to Martin Whitmore for this flag artwork! Also Marty has finished the artwork for the Collector Cards…squeee! They’re so nice! The Collector Cards only come with the first 100 sold and they’re very nice – all hand numbered too.
So what are we waiting for?
*looks around shiftily*…… MEEEEE! Ok so I now have all the elements, it’s all just down to me now (Annie!).
Here are my next tasks:
Figure the perfect size of Jeanne’s banner with printing and practical testing
Order Jeanne’s banner from the printers
Photograph each of the miniatures clearly
Write up the character summary for each of the four ladies
Design and proof the collector cards so they’re ready to be sent to the printers, including things like spellcheck and bleedcheck.
Send the collector card files to the printers
Edit the photographs of the miniatures and put together their packaging
Send the packaging files to the printers
Check the casts (most are here, the others won’t be long)
Pack the minis with their nice printed packaging
Collect the cards from the printers
Hand Number 400 cards
Pack all the pre orders
Await your glorious approval when they arrive around the world.
They won’t share a card, I just popped them on here to show them off, they won’t have a watermark either!
One of the reasons the Community Minis take longer than other releases is all these extra steps, but well worth it, I believe, to make it extra special and “collector-y” as it’s about the whole process and not just the end mini (which, of course, is beautiful). If this was ALL I had to do, it wouldn’t be so major, but of course, I have to run the day-to-day of Bad Squiddo Games as well as our other projects and releases, so sometimes bits have to be juggled around.
Something I really enjoy about this project is it forces me to do what I like the best – sitting back and researching and highly considering the figure design. When you’re busy all the time, doing just ONE THING can feel like a waste, even though it isn’t; it’s just how our brains work and the nature of the times we’re in. So sitting and reading a book can sometimes feel “un-optimised” which is, of course, ridiculous, but the Community Minis Project gives me the “excuse” to do it. For example, it’s Saturday right now and I really don’t mind that I’m sat working on this. This sort of work is different to the “work work”, like taxes and paperwork, navigating updated shipping regulations, marketing, budgeting, stats, all those extra tasks that aren’t the “core” of what we want to do.
Hooray I have the things!
Yay the things! I started writing this on Friday and it’s Saturday now, so I DO have the painted minis, and as always – they’re even nicer in person. Excuse the DOUBLE ANNIE FACE, I am fighting against the algorithms more than ever and the maths robots seem to like my face, so if it helps the creations get seen by more, then so be it!
They’re beautiful, thank you so much Jennie and John. I was able to balance Jeanne’s spear in hand! You’ll see the bottom part is unpainted, that bit will be snipped off as the wire spears come in very long. Some strong clippers will do this, I don’t recommend standard hobby clippers as they can get dented by them!
I’m very happy with how the spear sits into her hand, and prefer this to a drilled hand option. I just have to be careful to not ruin John’s work when I put it all together! The glue may make the inside of her hand a bit shiny so I’ll put some matt varnish over that after.
Remember this mock-up of Danny Devito? I wasn’t [just] losing my mind! They are the real-life measurements of the pennant! Obviously Jeanne wasn’t the same shape and size as Danny Devito (though there is nothing to say she wasn’t…just sayin’) but its a good rough idea. I’m a visual person so just seeing the measurements didn’t make sense to me.
So, my next task is to print out a few different sizes of the pennant to find the one that works best. Based on this, I may tweak it up or down if it works better on the model. Once I decide on this, using my own printer and black-and-white paper, I’ll order the full-colour ones from the printing company. I’ll also muck about with different paper types and thickness too to get it just right.
You can pre order all of Wave 2 HERE and claim your free collector card!
So here we go! If you missed Part One, check this out first. What do we know, first of all? Well, she wore men’s clothes. She has been depicted in dresses and skirts, but that’s more the symbolism, and we want to go as accurately as we can. I also wish to make figures that the historical person would approve of if they could see it somehow; come on Bill and Ted – lend me that time machine! She DIED because of her insistence on men’s clothes, so she’s getting them in 28mm! We won’t give her a helmet as we want to see her face, the face that grown men would have seen on the battlefield.
John Everett Millais – Joan of Arc, 1865, Very much in the Pre-Raphaelite style
In the variety of depictions, Jeanne has much in common with Eleanor of Aquitaine. They’re both shown highly stylised and dressed in what was a fashionably romanticised notion of her period at the time. I see this as a positive; you can see how they evolve over time yet keep the same key components, such as the banner and armour, in Jeanne’s case. It’s not historically accurate, but it is an insight into history in its own way.
I know some folk will want to see her hacking and slashing her way up a rampart, but this also goes against Jeanne’s position. I, too, wish to see more hack-and-slash medieval ladies, but you have to vote for them! We do have Jeanne de Clisson currently, but more would be a dream. Jean Hatchett very closely made it last time, perhaps on the next voting rounds? As I mentioned in the Eleanor of Aquitaine post, it’s good to keep them as much “themselves” as possible, instead of putting them into a different role.
To the Armouries!
After giving myself a headache looking at all sorts of armour, I decided to go to The Royal Armouries in Leeds for some hands-on research. Sculptor Alan Marsh came along!
L-R Me (Annie), Richard of ECW knowledge, and Alan: not his usual hat.
It was a superb chance to catch up and nerd out with many history chats over coffee and a delicious roulade. For a second time, I was impressed by how many books about women in history the gift shop has, which is even more than last time I was there. Of course, I had to buy some…
It’s brilliant to discuss upcoming figure design while in front of the actual pieces and, of course, feel the weight of different weapons. This all helps with the sculpting process to bring you these awesome-cool minis.
The Banner
Essential in Jeanne’s “kit” is the banner. She had several; important ones for us are the battle standard and the pennon. The battle standard was enormous and too unwieldy on foot, requiring a special saddle to prop it in. If we make a mounted version (I really want to, please buy loads of this to convince me!) we will use that for sure.
The pennon is the foot version, carried on a shorter pole and what she would have had to be mobile without her horse. With the mega battle standard, she wouldn’t be able to walk about.
When considering the pose, I figured that even though this is smaller, she would probably not be strong enough to hold it in the air one-handed, so it will be resting on the ground.
I found the measurements of both flags, so first I lay out the size of the pennon and needed something to help scale, and who better than Danny Devito?
There’s always a debate between cast banner and wire spear with transfer/paper. I have mulled this over for A LONG TIME. Cost is a significant factor, with these minis being £5 each, a big wavy bit of metal adds to the cost considerably. They can also become really clunky. I really want people to have their own unique Jeanne banner, and not a generic 15th century knight, so considered the possibility of getting a transfer made, but this is hard to apply along folds and creases of something sculpted.
Then, I mucked about with a wire spear and the paper we use for leaflets which found it to be a perfect thickness. I never did understand applying transfers to paper, when you could just have the paper printed in the first place. This would be a better quality than standard printer paper as well. So it’s now escalated to pricing up what the cost of our own designed pennon AND battle standard would be, as we might as well do both simultaneously, right! That mounted figure is happening whether I like it or not, isn’t it… (ha I protest too much for sure).
“I love my banner best – oh, forty times more than the sword! Sometimes I carried it myself when I charged the enemy, to avoid killing any one.” – Jeanne during her Trial.
Armour
Figure Design by Annie Norman, 2023
Several contemporary references to Jeanne being in “White Harness” armour exist. The white part means that it wasn’t embellished (Sorry Millais) and the harness part is that it is in many separate pieces. Jeanne was first given an “all in one” armour, then used some found Burgundian armour, and then was eventually commissioned this lovely piece by Charles VII. So that’s what I want to put her in.
It’s important to me that the pose is very much lifting the eyes upwards; Jeanne is holding the banner as high as she can so everyone can see, and she’s looking to the heavens for reassurance. These are all little signs that it is Jeanne d’Arc.
The hand-on-chest pose is used in several of the paintings and statues, and I appreciate the gentleness of it. However, in these, she is often shown bare-handed, I hope the gauntlets still have the same effect!
Eugène Samuel Grasset version of Jeanne
Something missing from my scribble is… The Holy Sword! That will be hanging from the scabbard, sheathed. Jeanne’s sword was the “Sword of St. Catherine”. A companion of Joan’s on the way to Orleans said, “I wanted to sharpen that old blade, but she said it was not necessary, as she should never kill anybody, and should carry it only as a symbol of authority.”
For the hair, we’re going for a shaggy bob, again to stand out more than a full “short back and sides”. This is one of the artistic decisions to make minis less literal sometimes, but not too far off reality – for example long flowing locks would be far off! A grown-out, super short hairdo is more justifiable.
I’m cutting this short as I feel like I’ve lived non-stop Jeanne for the last month and there is SO MUCH more I could write, but we’re nearing the end of the calendar year and I am sleepy, with more blog entries to complete!
The goal is to have these last two sculpted by the end of the week (ish) and then we can get voting on the next two between Christmas and New Year. Hooray!
Here we go. Strangely, this is the figure I am most nervous about designing so far. Joan of Arc, or Jeanne d’Arc is known and beloved by many, and perhaps THE most famous military woman in history, if not a solid top-five contender! She’d be a winning answer in Family Fortunes.
Jeanne D’Arc being excellent
The nerves come from this, that people have their own idea of who Jeanne was, what she did, and what she looked like. She’s a household name and has been portrayed in so many movies (of course, most memorably in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), some more faithful to historical records than others.
Jeanne d’Arc was born in 1412 CE, during the Hundred Years War, a long and bloody conflict between England and France, which she would be destined to shape. From a young age, she began hearing what she believed to be the voice of God, though there are attempts at modern diagnosis to explain this on a secular level. We will never know, as per the words of Ridley Scott “Were you there mate?”
This led her on an incredibly daring mission to ensure that Charles VII (currently the dauphin) was to be crowned King, and then his army could save France. The fact that a young girl could walk up to somebody so high ranking is wild enough, but the fact they [eventually] paid attention is even more fantastic. “Scuse me, Sirs, you’re doing war wrong”.
Jeanne portrayed L-R by Vinzez Sozvr Zovzanza 15-20th Century, Albert Lynch, 1903 and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres 1854
Jeanne led the French Army through highs and lows in the pushback against the English, becoming a mighty hype for morale, waving her banner and yelling for them to push on. An army believing they have God on their side is exceedingly powerful. While it was unlikely she would have fought intentionally, due to her age, size, and lack of combat training, Jeanne’s presence and encouragement were where her power really lay. In wargames, we have rules such as “Inspiring Presence” for banner bearers, and it really was just that!
Jeanne as portrayed by Milla Jovovich in “The Messenger”, 1999
After a defeat at Margny, she was captured, after pretty much being abandoned by the King she helped create and put on trial by a mixed jury of French, English, and their French allies – the Burgundians.
The trial was as you can imagine – incredibly unfair. However, Jeanne was brilliant (the record of the trial is actually online) and managed to make it through the thorough questioning. What I find bizarre, about the entire odd tale, is they effectively “got her” in the end for her trousers. She insisted on wearing men’s clothes to show she was a soldier, the same as others, and under the direction of God. Crossdressing was seen as blasphemous so she was sentenced to death. Refusing to refute her Mission from God, Jeanne d’Arc was burned to death before a public audience on May 30, 1431, aged just 19.
I normally keep these summaries reasonably brief, to encourage people to read more, but there’s a bit more this time. Sometimes a story or figure can become so well-known that you actually forget the details. So there’s a refresher! There is course far, far more to the story, but that’s the jist!
Designing Jeanne d’Arc
You know what? I’m putting this into the next entry, as this is fairly long, and I have a BIT more research to do. Keep them hungry, as they say!
Community Miniatures Project 