writes:These figures were sent to us by Oddzial Osmy as part of a Teutonic force, and they have been painted for us by PhilGreg Painters in Sri Lanka.
While I have commanded Teutonic armies previously, I'm no expert on what they're supposed to look like, so my instructions to PhilGreg were simple: match the look from the pack's color illustration!
The spears and pavises come separate from the figures. To avoid breakage in shipping, I asked the painting service to leave these parts unassembled. (I finished the assembly here at TMP.)
The spears shown here are not the ones provided with the figures (which I believe are metal spears). PhilGreg substituted spears made from plastic bristles, for which I am grateful - plastic spears don't get the "bendies" like metal ones.
However, those still aren't the spears you see here. Unfortunately, the spears were packaged for shipping before the paint was dry, and were stuck together on arrival. Also, the spears provided were 70mm long and looked more like pikes (I think the painting service might have sent 28mm spears instead of 15mm ones). Fortunately, it was simple to strip the paint off the plastic spears, cut them down to 20-25mm in length, and repaint them.
(One tip for those making spears from plastic bristles: It can be hard to get a sharp point on your spears, as the plastic tends to fray rather than sharpen. One trick is instead of cutting the bristles straight across, cut them at an angle to give you a more pointed ending. Use a sharp pair of clippers, or the bristles won't break cleanly.)
One oddity I noted is that it's not always possible to place the spear "in" the spear hand of the figure - sometimes, you just have to settle for close enough.
I've based the figures individually, to make it easier to reconfigure the elements when moving between different rulesets.
Note that while the pack comes with 32 figures, only twelve of them are in the front-rank kneeling pose. That leaves you with enough "standing" spearmen to not quite fill the next two rows.