Useful Blogs--or at least I think so.

I have a couple of blogs I'd like to plug.  First is the Quindia Studios blog by Clarence Harrison.  Harrison has great pics of his work, and keeps us up to date on his League of Augsburg project.  But I confess I got there for only one reason.  Flag Mondays. Each Monday Harrison posts a useful flag for the American War of Independence.  Though he has plans to do British flags, he's mostly sticking with American banners.  American flags are tough because little is know about them for certain.  He's created beautiful flags for those units he is certain about, as well as those he's hypothesized for.  He also has some gorgeous national banners.  Every Monday.  I've downloaded 21 of them, and now all I have to do is make use of them.

Clare Harrison's Stars and Stripes variants.

Another blog I've taken to following belongs to Doug Hamm.  I've written a little about Doug before.  He is my good friend from Surrey, B.C. who often prods me about my lack of blog posts.  Doug has recently introduced his own blog, Dots of Paint.  Doug is a wonderful painter, certainly the fastest painter I've ever known and he is a master of the black primer paint system.  He has some fabulous projects he's created--a mammoth War of 1812 collection, a very nice pile of figures for the First Jacobite Rebellion, some very nice French and Indian War figures and many other explorations in other periods.  I'm sure he'll have some interesting things to say and share. Yes the Battle of Smythville does seem to have borrowed my name, which I'll try to understand at a later date.

These aren't French Napoloeonics, they are Plauche's New Orleans militia battalion from the Battle of New Orleans.  Doug Hamm has cornered the market on War of 1812, the interesting and the uninteresting.

Dansk Figursspilsforening

I'm always hoping to stumble across free resources on the web--like posted copies of the Journal of Medieval Military History that cost $95 bucks a pop. Yeah, right. Every now and then, however, I do stumble across something truly useful that fills a need, saves money, and saves hours of work. One of these is Dansk Figursspilforening. No, I can't say it, and I don't really know what it means-I just know it has something to do with Danish miniature wargaming. It appears to be club site, perhaps with tons of information, all in Danish. However, It does have some super cool downloads. The site has many flags for a variety of periods including the American Revolution and American Civil War, Russian Civil War and the Crusades. Along with the downloads is information about printing and resizing in English.
For my money, however (ironic, since everything is free) the most valuable downloads on the site are all of the heraldic banners from the Hundred Years War. The site offers banners for Crecy and Poitiers. Obviously they have English and French heraldry, but they also include Gascons, Flemings, Germans and other mercenaries who made an appearance. Not ten or twenty different designs, but hundreds. Below are a couple of examples.












As you can see, many of the banners often come with a certain amount of narration explaining if the noted knight or noble carried that device into other battles as well. Typically, I paste these into a word document and size them in a way I can best use them. Then I paint over the colors to give it more of a hand painted look before gluing them on to a brass standard, finishing off everything with a gloss varnish. I'm thinking about looking into different printer paper that may look more standard-like.

In any case, I hope you find this a useful site as well. It's linked on the right. I think the site owners have done a super job and provided a very handy resource.