28mm Successors

 Last year at Warfare I turbocharged a rather slow-motion project to collect and paint a Successor army in 28mm by picking up a load of mostly-Victrix plastis figures to give me more than enough to cook up most Successor armies.

I'd already done a couple of test bases (elephants, some Thracians and a slinger unit) but with real life getting in the way for much of this year I'd really struggled to make time and desk space for painting and assembling the rest of the army... until quite recently when I made a stab at getting most of the lighter units ready to put on table. 

This meant some kitbashing with the plastic spares box, mostly working with one of the original Victrix boxes of Hellenistic Skirmishers - a 50+ body box with plenty of javelin and other light troops in it - together with having a bash at the couple of units of Galatians that every self-respecting Seleucid army needs to have in the middle of their line.

I decided to go for a "Contrast First" painting style for the army, starting with a matt white undercoat and then doing all of the flesh on these skirmishers and Thracians in Darkoath Flesh. 

This was almost good enough just for me to go with it for the army, but with the Galatians in particulat warranting a little more effort I then decided to add some rather rough and ready "impressionistic" musculature to the figures in an effort to see if I could do this to a decent enough standard that it wouldn't look totally rubbish!

This was the first real pass at it, using Vallejo Dark Flesh to pick out muscles on the figures. If you zoom in you can see its fairly basic stuff, but I did find these Victrix figures were ideally sculpted to help you identify which bits to pick out and highlight.

I then added a mix of mostly subdued colours to the skirmishers - the white is actually a Warlord Games paint called Holy White that seems to give a good effect without going "too" grey.

The Galatians got a bit more demarcation of their musculature as well at this stage, with some Sunny Skin Tone from Vallejo for additional highlights

After the usual rigmarole of white / gloss varnish / waterslide transfer / gloss varnish with a bit of Microsol and Microset thrown in for good measure the Galatian then had Battle Flag shield patterns too. 

These are the "Thracians" - they are Victrix Hellenistic Skirmisher bodies with added cloaks left over from various figures, some Gothic and Davian heads, and 2-part "falx's" made from the (over-) long curved sword blades from the Fireforge Arab Cavalry box glued onto one side of a figures fist, and a cut-off bit of spear (I think from the Gripping Beast Romans, as it looks pretty thick) glued to the other side. 

There are also plenty of javelinmen and archers - the guys with extra spears behind their shields are soaking up some of the excess javelins in the Victrix pack which have been snipped in half and glued either side of the fist holding the shield. 

The Galatians look particularly jolly with their shields all finished (with painted edges to match the transfer in most cases).  I just about managed to fit 7 on a standard 60x40 base, which gives a very dense formation feel IMO.

And here are the rest of the guys, with sand + woodstain basing, just now waiting for some touchups in bronze (post-matt varnishing) and for me to find and apply some static grass and grass tufts - which are somewhere in the house but are yet to be found! 

Once they are done I'll put some lightbox photos up of the finished articles