Do figures of different sizes ever look good?

[sppenn]

Curious if anyone else has sought out figures of different sizes when building an army.

When I built a Gallic army a few years ago, I used several different sources of figures.  I ended up with lots of different sizes and different poses - some short some tall.  I think the army looks good.  Nobody has ever said, "That's a goofy looking army."  Maybe they thought it, but no one has ever said it.

Just wondering if others have tried to create an army with figures of different height and how did it turn out. 

[nikgaukroger]

Whilst it is illogical, after all people are different heights, I much prefer the look of figures all basically the same height and build within a unit. A bit more variation is OK across the units in an army but not too much.

[sultanbev]

This came up recently in the Pendraken forum.
The main problem with using figures of different sizes is that the weapons will also be different sizes, so you will end up thick fat long spears (tree trunks) alongside thin spindly ones, or bows of different lengths. Or Romans with differing lengths of gladius. Whilst for ancient periods this may not be so bad for irregular armies, it makes a difference for periods where guns or even spears and swords were manufactured to same dimensions. Eg having 20 Chechen rebels with 5 different sizes of AK47 and RPG-7 looks sooo wrong.
One of the reasons I quit 15mm and am switching to 10mm for Napoleonics and WW2 is the vastly differing figure sizes in 15/18mm in the periods I want.

Mark

[Nathan]

I think sultanbev has hit the nail on the head - the weapons (and perhaps shields) are the key thing to get the same. If you do that, you can mix different figures much more without it looking wrong.

I almost always replace spears, pikes and lances anyway so that isn't a problem. For my Italian Wars French crossbowmen, I replaced most of the crossbows so that the bow part would be the same width and then used an extreme mix of different manufacturer's figures, with very different builds.

https://smallitalianwars.blogspot.com/2016/02/french-crossbowmen-adventurers-2.html
https://smallitalianwars.blogspot.com/2020/06/more-italian-wars-french-crossbowmen.html

The other thing is to add a bit of card under the bases of any that are excessively short to bring them within a 'reasonable' range. I guess you could do the same with some figures for a unit where all are of identical height to mix things up a bit.

[sppenn]

That is a good point.  Hadn't thought about the weapons, shields, and stuff.  Makes sense.

One reason that I asked the questions is that I bought a partially painted Philistine army from a friend recently. He added a figure for Goliath the giant.  He thought it added character to the army.