Oi! You! Peasants!

The last (for now) iteration of the Great Biblical Army Painting Frenzy is three units of levy.

They fit naturally in the Assyrian army, where the high quality (and cost) of many of the line troops means that adding in some levy occasionally may well be a good idea, but there are other armies than can also use some. too.

With that in mind I chose to use Museum's Minoan and Mycenean range as the basis for these units, making them up out of naked spearmen and bowmen, together with a couple of slinger figures - as how much more generic can you get if you haven't got a uniform at all?

The paint job is kinda simple!

I guess if I ever try and run more than he 9 proper Mycenean spear units I own I could even press-gang these to serve as extra (ill-equipped) spearmen!

Yet more Assyrians...

Finalising (I hope...) the Assyrian project, and having actually looked at what might be a viable list before buying the figures this time I've added some Heavy Swordsmen and Javelinmen to my Assyrian army.

All of these figures are still from Museum Miniatures - it does mean I only have round shields rather than a mix of tower shields and round ones, but hey, I still like them !

For ADLG I'm basing Javelinmen in 5's to a base. These are listed as "Aramaean Infantry Auxiliary spear" on the Museum site, and have an actual Assyrian soldier in the middle of the base as getting two sets of 5 figures out of a single pack of 8 Arameans was sadly beyond me!

These guys count as Swordsmen in the rules, so I've tried to keep the number of upright-held-spear spearmen down somewhat and use a lot of swordsmen in the front rank.

The guy in the second rank with a crested helmet is an Urartian Infantryman according to Museum, but his shield is the same size as the Assyrian figures so he can sneak in as a second ranker pretty easily. Painting the crest black also means it doesn't jump out at you as being different.

The blue shields will mostly be used as the Elite units, with red as the default colour for normal line infantry.

Mahoosive Camels!

Whats that coming over the hill? Is it a Monster ?

Or is it a Museum Miniatures Midianite Bedouin Camel?

Having bought a dozen of the aforementioned creatures recently to flesh out an allied contingent for my Assyrians my plan was to use some old Essex bow-armed camel riders I had kicking about as the Light Camels and use the double-crewed Midianite ones as the Medium Camelry with bows in the core Early Bedouin ally.

Museum figures are made of a really strong but pliable metal compound, so tweaking one of the bowmen's arms and cutting off his bow to turn him into a flag holder to create a Commander/General figure was fairly easy to do;

But just have a look how these beasts compare size-wise to the Essex camels !

They are great figures, even allowing for the single pose - but boy are they huge!

Rug-a-dub-dub

Here's another refurbished Ghaznavid/Arab elephant, this time with an added printed rug:

The print quality isn't perhaps as good as it could be as I printed it with a relatively low resolution printer but as a test of concept I am still quite pleased with it.

The rugs can be found on my Pinterest page

The Paphlagonians survive a varnish experience

Much to my relief, the ink-washed Xyston figures did come through a spray varnish this morning unscathed.

If anything it seems to have helped highlight the definition and texture of their silk-effect uniforms.

As you can see from the left shoulder of the chap in the front left corner of this base, there has still been some colour-bleed between the different inked colours, but whether it's something which is worth (or even possible) to touch up without making it look worse is questionable.

Now all I need to do is steel myself to grab a very fine brush and paint in their headbands...

15mm Xyston Paphlagonians & Takabara

There's plenty of early classical era armies which have a handful of "Persian Takabara", "Paphlagonian", "Arachosian" or other "Generic Eastern-ish Minor Nation" Medium Infantry, armed either with javelins or spears.  These guys are never vital, but often "nice to have" - especially as Javelinmen in L'Art de la Guerre to give an army a nice little anti-elephant force.

In the same Attack! purchase from Damian at Donnington as the recently-finished Egyptian Marines now come some Xyston Takabara and Paphlagonian infantry to fill that particular gap.

These figures have Thracian-style shields which need to be glued onto the figures (using my standard 2-part epoxy liquid metal).

The shields were close enough in shape that I was able to dig out some unused LBMS Thracian transfers - sadly I only had 4 left, meaning I had to actually paint the other ones myself (nightmare!)

The uniforms are done almost entirely in inks - not even washes, proper Windsor and Newton ink (amazon affilate link) on a white base coat.

This is a technique I've used on Persians in the past, as it gives a distinctive "silks" effect. There are only a handful of colours in use, namely Blue, Vridian, Deep Red and Peat Brown (the latter being on the leather gilets some of the guys are wearing, which were painted either leather brown or Skeleton Bone as a base colour).

The end result is a pretty bright and cheery set of unit, and with shields which don't look too badly out of place even with a few LBMS ones in the front rank as well.

The challenge with using ink as a main colour is that it doesn't fully dry - painting anything next to an inked area leads to the ink bleeding into the new, liquid colour.

That also makes applying varnish by brush almost impossible too - hence these not (yet) being matt varnished, and also not (yet) having painted leather straps as headbands on some of the figures.

My aim is to use a spray varnish instead of trying to brush one on, but at the moment it's too cold outside to risk spraying them.  After that they will look more matt, and be easier to handle.

Museum Miniatures Assyrian Army

Having been rather light on Biblical armies, ADLG and its easy-to-collect army size has allowed me to turbocharge this previously neglected part of my collection.

First up were the Myceneans, and then the NKE ended up being rebased as well. But now, finally, and after 30 years of collecting and gaming I now have an Assyrian army as well!

As with the Myceneans, my choice was to go with Museum figures. They are a little static in their poses and stylized, but for Biblical era I feel that this style works really well.

The Assyrians are a ruthlessly efficient army and so the regular poses of most of the men also feels right. Many of the colour choices were inspired by (but sadly not particularly closely copied from) the fantastic 28mm Foundry range, which have provided three Generals elements for this army as well.

The highlight is of course the Chariotry - which I've tarted up using a common or garden cheap printer and some Google-fu to search for "Assyrian Patterns", downloading and printing out some images to paste onto the walls of the Chariots to surprisingly good effect.

There's a full page of pictures of all of the figures, together with paint selection details (and links to eBay to find the paints) to browse now;

 

There is also a video of all of these photos on Youtube

Xyston "Egyptian Spearmen"

Along with the Assyrians the festive Madaxeman workbench has been a home for quite some time for 2 packs of Xyston Egyptian Spearmen, bought from Damian at Donnington at Attack! in Devizes earlier this year.

They fall into the category of "I'm not quite sure what to do with them but they are great figures so I bought them anyway". If only there was an army list for this I'd be able to field all sorts of stuff from my collection much more often!

There are probably a couple of armies that they can appear in - some of the "non NKE" Egyptian ones in the ADLG lists, and given the shields I could maybe sneak them into an Assyrian or Babylonian lineup as well I guess.

I did the clever painter-y thing on their kilts of doing darker stripes of blue, and then adding a lighter, thinner stripe inside them to give an impression of some texture.

White undercoats for the men, black for the shields. The shields are stuck on with my go-to solution for shields, 2-part "liquid metal" epoxy from Araldite (affiliate link).

Basing is the usual sand + Rustins Wood Stain + 2 layers of drybrushing before adding some tufts and static grass

WiP 15mm Assyrians

A Museum Miniatures January sale order finally makes it onto the painting table... after the somewhat disappointing outings so far for the Mycenaeans, these are the first bases of Assyrians to be fully finished as I test out colour schemes for this army.

The uniform scheme I’m going with is rather dour, with dark blues and reds. This seems to suit the ruthless efficiency of the Assyrian war machine. 

No doubt the final army will also end up having the old classic wargamers trope of different coloured shields for the Elite and Regular quality troops!

 

I an still undecided about patterned horse blankets. Could easily look too gaudy. 

My original army list to use the figures I bought doesn’t bear much resemblance to any of the Assyrian lists I’ve been beaten by this year, so an extra order may be required. Luckily there should be another sale along soon!