Skythians (and a half!)

 As you will probably already know, I've recently bought an all-options set of Steppe horsemen from Forged in Battle, allowing me to make up any number of horse archer/charging lancer armies from across the ages (as long as you don't mind pretending that the figures sold as "Sarmatians" are also appearing as Alans, Goths, Gepids and, in this particular case, Skythians as well).

One of the downsides of such a morph-tastic army is that you can end up with a lot of very similar figures from the same range, which counter-intuitively sometimes means they can all look a bit same-ey. My plan to avoid this pitfall was to pick up some odd packets from other ranges too and mix them into the mostly-Sarmatian army, and at the top of the list was a packet of 12 Skythian Nobles.

As it turned out, these chaps were actually very different to the FiB Sarmatians, with peculiar armour, shorter spears, and a unique set of horse castings with unusual armour as well - meaning my theory of mixing them into the Sarmatians for variety really wasn't going to work.

Instead I decided to go the opposite way - painting and basing all 12 of the Skythian Nobles up together - which in turn led into another challenge in that the very-unique horses in this pack also only came in a couple of very similar poses.

The solution? Add some Sarmatian horses and riders back into the set of a dozen Skythian nobles to give them more variety - and here are the results!

This had ended up giving me a more-than-needed 6 bases of Skythian-style Noble Cavalry, with the unarmoured horses being from the non-Skythian packs 

The Skythian horses are slightly fatter across the back than the non-Skythian ones, which means in turn the pure-Skythian riders also have a wider stance than the Sarmatian ones - so a bit of leg bending has gone on to create this set!

The horses are as usual done with mostly contrasts, with Army Painter Hardened Leather used for the reins. 

One not particularly ambitious experiment with this army has been to paint all of the saddle cloths in striped patterns, all of which are sort of different. 

The overall effect is one my opponent won't benefit from I guess - but at least I get to see something better than a load of horses arses!

The Skythian Nobles are in this sort of strange blocky armour, which I chose to paint up as being leather scales, using GW Contrast Aggaros Dunes with a wash of Army Painter Strong Tone to really pick out the deep details on these FiB figures.

They are some of the nicest figures I have painted in recent years, making me suspect that Andy the FiB sculptor must have something of a "thing" for Skythians, as they seem to have had a lot more work put into them than perhaps some of the Sarmatian figures!

I've also added a number of "spots", usually in sets of three, but sometimes as edging or sleeve braiding to these guys as well in order to make them a bit more, well, "Skythian-ish". 

It's a simple addition, made only slightly more difficult by the addition of a smaller dot of colour inside each white spot, but I feel it is really effective at giving the impression of me having added a lot more detail and made a lot more effort in painting than I have actually done!

I dithered about the colours for the crests and "ponytails" but in the end went for black, with GW Templar Black contrast giving them a bit of depth.

Here you can see the spots and stripes on the saddle cloths more clearly.

 

And here the mostly-leather armour really pings in this photo too. 

More Sarmatians (and friends) to come soon...