28mm Successor Light Cavalry

I've now done three units of Successor Light Cavalry, all using the Greek Light Cavalry sprue from Victrix 

These are javelin-armed cavalry, of course using LBMS shield transfers.

There is a great range of heads on the Victrix sprue, allowing me to have some with the floppy hats and others (probably of a higher grade) in metal helmets.

The white (or grey..) shield on the back guy is a healthy reminder that LBMS transfers really do need an imacculate white background - this one was off-white as the white spray undercoat had landed lightly on that part of the model, and I foolishly didn't overpaint it before applying the sticker. End result - an off white rather drab shield.

I've started doing the metal on my figures after matt varnishing them - it really means it does shine, especially when using Game Colour Brassy Brass 

Annoyingly I noticed that I'd missed the back of one shield on this guy - it's now been painted over! 

I made up one unit s Promodroi light lancers - again using the same Plastruct rod as on the previous cavalry. 

I think the shield colour is actually Iyanden Yellow, which has pooled nicely to gve a burnished  bronze effect before applying a waterslide transfer.

This arm looks at a funny angle in this shot, but is OK in real life (honest) 

Gryph-Hound Orange makes a great and distinctive "posh" tunic colour to really make these guts stannd out as a unit to watch on-table I think !

More horsemen to come soon...

28mm Hellenistic Cavalry

My Successor/Hellenistic project moves on apace, with a recent spell of dry(ish) weather allowing me to do some outdoor spray undercoat, and then matt varnishing to make a dent in the cavalry contingent of this almost-all 28mm Victrix army.

An ever-increasing proportion of my painting is drifting towards Contrast (and Speed..) Paints, and the horses in this army I think will all end up being completed in this "so good it feels cheaty and a bit dirty" medium. 

 

Agaros Dunes is the leopard pelt colour here, with the firm favourite of Warlord Holy White for the grey horse. 

These are Heavy Cavalry lancers - I replaced the Vixtrix-supplied lances immediately, as they are very obviously not going to stand up to any sort of wargame handling at all, and drilled out the hands (manually) to accommodate home-made spears from 1.1mm (0.45") styrofoam round rods from Plastruc. 

These are really flexible, so will bend but not snap while also being really lightweight - a great combination where metal spears of this length would no doubt end up getting caught while being handled and then would break off the guys hands at the wrist. 

The Plastruct material is also really soft, so I was easily able to squash the ends of each spear flat, and then cut it into a V shape to form spear points which are also wider than the spear shafts.

If you want to pick some up for yourself, here's an affiliate link to eBay UK https://ebay.us/QLbKOr (and if you end up buying anything from it I'll geta teeny tiny commission from eBay too!) 

These are javelin-armed regular cavalry - I think the spears are a mix of the Victrix originals and also some slightly more robust Gripping Beast ones from their Roman and Arab boxes. 

If you keeping all of the spare arms you can then cut some spear-holding hands off at the wrist, do the same with the Victrix guys wrists and then glue the GB hands and spears to the Victrix guys arms to give your troops more robust spears, straight out of the bits box  

The white clothing on these cavalry is normal white paint layered over a base of Holy White - shield patterns from some spare Hoplite waterlide transfers, on a shield painted with a Contrast Orange which I think gives a really good "it could be burnished bronze" effect.

More pics to come over the next few days. 

Painting 28mm Successors from Victrix: The Light Troops

I've finally managed to get some of the 28mm Victrix Successors I previewed in a half-painted state a few weeks ago finished, and into the light box for some professional-grade (ahem) photos. 

The context to this is that I'm building my first ever Successor/Alexandrian 28mm army, and so with a huge range of troops to choose from in Successor armies I didn't want to do my usual "try and make and spray the whole army in one go" thing, but instead break the task down into manageable chunks that I could stay motivated to complete - hence deciding to start with the "light" troops

That ended up meaning that my first (OK second - I have completed and taken photos of some test bases before now) batch of figures for this army ended up being Light Infantry, Javelinmen, Peltasts and a couple of bases of Galatian crazy heavy infantry (because, well, they are really cool figures.)

And, the results are now in, with this smattering of photos plus a whole lot more on the website :

The Successor painting page on the website has all of these and more, as well as some commentary on how I approached painting them in a "Contrast-plus" style.

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 

  

 

   

The Last Almughavar

 Nope, it's not a new Spanish-language film to get history buffs excited, it is instead the final unit of Fireforge Games Almughavars which have finally been snipped from the sprue and added to my Medieval Spanish (& Feudal Spanish) armies. 

As with the others (unsurprisingly) these guys went together really easily, although for Almughavar purists you will see that I rather ran out of left arms and had to give a couple of the guys lurking at the back a shield in order to round out the unit.

The big innovation here was to add in a morning star from the Fireforge Crusading Knights box set, thus giving the lead dude a pretty cool and unusual choice of anachronistic weaponry to lead the line with.

I originally did this by gluing on an army from the box of Knights, which meant his right arm was fully mailed while his left was in Barcelona-summertime attire of short sleeves - something I sort of justified to myself on health and safety grounds to do with using a flailing set of spiked balls as a weapon.

After basing the unit though I realised this actually just looked weird, so I snipped the offending mailed arm off at the shoulder (it came off cleanly as this was where the join was located) and then added a new short-sleeved one which had originally been holding a spear.  

The spear I cut off cleanly just above the fist, and then using plastic cement (airfix glue in old money) carefully attached the handle (?) of the morning star, having also snipped that off cleanly just above the mailed fist that was holding it.

This all pretty much worked OK, as airfix glue melds the two bits together making a very strong join - but just to be belt and braces I also had positioned the morning stars such that I could superglue one of them to the top of the owners helmet for that "second point of contact" to make the joint more stable.  

So, here they are ready to go, with the newly upgraded arm in pride of place. 

(I won't mention that there is a chap in the second rank with a fully armoured right arm holding a mace, who I couldn't quite reach after fixing the figures to the base!) 

 

The Taifa Andalusians head to the West Country

With the warmth of Spain now a distant memory, barely a week after going to Alicante with the 15mm Berbers it was time for the 28mm Taifa Andalusian army to try it's luck on Southern shores as I headed to the PAW show in Plymouth for some more ADLG action.

The army featured Almughavars, Knights, Spearmen and all sorts of other odds and ends, most of which you will have seen in the paint queue on this website at some point in the last couple of years.

Over the 4-game weekend they took on the Christian Nubians, the First Crusade and a couple of Sicilian Norman armies as well, all of which has been documented in 4 separate 10-15 minute videos in which I attempt to explain what I thought I was trying to do!

See how the forces of the Reconquista (and those who perhaps weren't so keen on that idea too) fared in these 4 reports from PAW

Fireforge Feudal Knights

I've been gradually building out a Feudal Spanish/Taifa army from the basis of my existing 28mm Arabs, a handful of Norman-style spearmen and some bring and buy metal knights, but what's been missing has been some "not all fully caparisoned" knights to distinguish the Elite from the Ordinary.

So, when shopping at SELWG, a box set of the Fireforge Templar Knights ended up being the solution, and here they (already) are:

I recycled some very old Space Marine waterslide transfers for these, as my painting isn't neat enough to do sharp-edged crosses

The guy (or as they are a kit, the arm) with the flail is pretty cool. The sprues come with more than one of these so my next Almughavar base may end up with a guy armed with this too!

More upcycled Space Marine graphics - I very roughly painted in some extra texture into the white-only transfers of the Pegasus and the stag's head to give them a bit more depth.

This guy doesn't have a weird helmet - its the mace of the guy in the middle (who also has a GB Arab head to make these feel a bit more El Cid "Spanish Reconquista" era) 

The painting-in is more visible here on the barding

Every time I do it I regret starting a check pattern, but this one is not too bad IMO

A jolly nice set which have painted up quickly and effectively!