Nikephorian 15mm Cavalry Conversion

Inspired by the rather lovely Nikephorian armies which were on display in Patras, and realising that I have far too many early-ish Byzantine cavalry to ever use in one army I was recently inspired to convert some of them to later Nikephorian Byzantines.

Or, to be more accurate, I;

• sliced off the Essex Thematic (?) Byzantine Cavalrymen's small round shields with a scalpel, 
• replaced the too-thin, too-bendy Essex lancers with cheap sewing pins bought from eBay while I was at it
• cadged some kite and heater shields from a clubmate and glued them onto the now-sliced-off bits on the figures bodies.

After a bit of a go at painting overly-complicated shield patterns copied badly from other websites later, here you go - 6 units of Nikephorian Byzantine Lance & Bow armed Heavy Cavalry ready for the table!

The unit with the General in the centre has brass rod for its spears - I then realised that they are clearly just too thick for these chaps though, so I did the rest with cut-off sewing pins .

They won't win any awards, but not too shabby for a bit of recycling methinks.

On a similar basis, I also re-painted the shields on some almost-never-used Skoutatoi and glued the bases together to make ADLG units. Here's the slightly less impressive result.

The Icon standard is just downloaded off a Google search for Byzantine Icons, printed out and stuck on.

Maybe an army to use at Cry Havoc later this summer?