Forged in Battle Byzantine Infantry Skirmishers

 Now you're probably sick of seeing horses for my Byzantines, here are some pedestians! 

Yes, the Byzantine armies can often have a handful of foot slingers, archers, and javelinmen - including, in ADLG terms, some actual proper Medium Foot javelineers, and fortunately FiB do a pack of mixed javelins and slings to make up these chaps. 

The pack in question is WE-BE08 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Psiloi (Slingers (12) & Javelins (12), which has rather more slingers than is needed in ADLG, but fewer javelinmen. 

My solution was to base up a mix of Light Infantry with slings and javelins, and then to make up 3 bases of Medium Javelineers using 3 javelin figures and two slingers lurking behind them.

I've painted them in three distinct schemes, which I suspect will help as it seems likely that a slinger and a javelin light foot will be found in each of the three commands in my arm - when it gets on table eventually. 

I also didn't go with shield designs on these, partly as they are lower class troops so may not have invested as much time and effort in shield designs, but mainly as the shields ate pretty small, so it would have been too hard to do a decent design on them!

 

Forged in Battle Byzantine Cavalry - Part 6

 In this rather large batch of cavalry you will already have spotted a bit of mix-and-match going on in order to make up various types of lance and bow armed horsemen. 

That process, of maxing out the "cavalry", did still leave me with a handful of spare figures to create some actual "light cavalry" - with any shortfall I may need in army design terms being made up by repurposing some of my old Essex Late Roman horse archers if required.

So, here are the dregs, sorry, the Light Horse Skirmishers and Scouts for the Byzantines!

One of the bonuses of ADLG (or indeed any DBX set) is not having to paint up "units" of lots of identical figures, and so I have gone with 3 different uniforms for these chaps to allow them to be clearly identified as beelonging to different commands on-table.   

There are various figures from WE-BE05 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Hyperkerastai (Bow), again using the same paints as in the first post in this set of 6. 

Hopefully these photos, and my witterings about painting them have been of use - if you want to look at more Byzantines these, and many other photos of other ranges, can be browsed in the 15mm Gallery on the Madaxeman website.

Forged in Battle Byzantine Cavalry - Part 5

 With teeny-tiny shields, and then slightly larger shields having been ticked off, its now time for the larger almost-Roman-era shields to appear in this ongoing series of Forged in Battle Byzantine cavalry. 

The lance-armed amongst the following chaps are from WE-BE03 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Kavallarioi Lancers, with paints etc being done as per the information in the first post in this sequence. 

FiB tend to include more riders than horses in their packs, so typically you get 12 horses but 2-3 extra riders, in the shape of officer / commander types. This means a lot of included commanders !

This shield has come out pretty well IMO - it is a flat white base coat with Yanden Yellow sloshed all over it, and a red rim applied in real paint - possibly Vallejo Scarlet? The fairly half-hearted shield design was done using a red AK paint pen 

The archers are from WE-BE04 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Kavallarioi Bow

Pretty much all of the shield "patterns" were done with the AK paint pens - worth noting how well and how clearly the yellow design on a red background at the back left of this formation (as you look at them) has some out, as often yellows do fare away on a darker background.

The final trache of cavalry from this painting batch is up in a few days time. 

Forged in Battle Byzantine Cavalry - Part 4

 In the 4th tranche of photos of my newly-minted Forged in Battle Byzantines come some even more bow-tastic horsemen, armed with more bows than lances this time.

The idea of basing them up as 2+1 in this way is to allow me to represent the lower quality units in the Byzantine military panoply - the more bows per base, the lower the quality of the unit. 

All paints etc as per the first post in this sequence.

As previously, the archers are from WE-BE05 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Hyperkerastai (Bow), with lancers from WE-BT07 Middle Byzantine (Thematic) - Prokousatores (Lance & Bow Armed).

I didn't do anything design-wise with these shields - as they are meant to be lower quality troops they just get given a basic shield from the armoury (and the pose of the lancer figure in the centre of each base means you can hadly see the face of the shield anyway).

More to come soon.

Forged in Battle Byzantine Cavalry - Part 3

The third tranche of FiB cavalry now hits the screens, with some actual lance and bow armed riders this time to pad out the non-bow-armed "lance-and-bow" cavalry from earlier this week! 

These are a mix of two packs - WE-BT07 Middle Byzantine (Thematic) - Prokousatores (Lance & Bow Armed) for the lancers, and archers drawn from WE-BE04 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Kavallarioi Bow and WE-BE05 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Hyperkerastai (Bow).

The shield designs (using the word "design" somewhat laughingly..) are hand-drawn using the AK paint pens. They have fairly soft fibre tips so even now, after fairly limited usage, I am unsure whether they will have retained enough sharpness in their nibs to allow me to recreate these rather lacklustre attempts at a Chi Rho design.

And here are the chaps with their sword-waving commanders as well. 

More cavalry incoming soon.

Forged in Battle Byzantine Cavalry - Part 2

This is the second tranche of new FiB Byzantine cavalry, following on from the set I posted last week. 

This handful of figures are a mix of sword-armed officers plucked at random from various packs, with the lancers being from the pack WE-BT07 Middle Byzantine Thematic Prokousatores which are listed as being "Lance & Bow Armed" on the FiB website. 

These lance-armed figures however don't actually seem to have bows!

With this mix of figures I envisage using these either as two distinctive units (with no actual "shooting"  bowmen) or as commanders for mixed bow/lance armed units equipped with the same sized shields.

Paints etc are the same as listed in the previous post, with the fairly unambitious shield designs being done by hand (as if you couldn't see that anyway!) 

More of these figures - this time with added bowmen - to come shortly.  

Forged in Battle Byzantine Cavalry - Part 1

With my rather tired and aged Essex Byzantine cavalry having been succesfully eBay'ed in the middle of last year I had been in the market for some new spiffy Byzantine cavalry for some time, and so at the Warfare show in November I picked up a load of packs of Forged in Battle Byzantines of various types. 

My aim was to create a set of cavalry which would cover the "lance and bow" options for most of the huge span of Byzantine history, adding to the two dozen horsemen from the FiB ranges that I already had painted up some time before (Early Byantine lancers painted last year, and some even earlier Late Roman lancers painted in 2023), and the 18 refurbished/reshielded "kite shield" cavalry for the Middle and Late period which had survived my Essex cull as well.

This would mean taking a few liberties with shield sizes and the like, but my theory is always that the armour and equipment of these sorts of guys would not quite be as regimented or consistent as some of us may like to think, so using stuff slightly out of period is not really that bad as long as the vibe is correct.  

I also fired up this new 10" Puluz LED Light Box, which I ordered off of eBay after my old cheap one collapsed!

It seems really good so far, much more robust than my old one, and so if you fancy one yourself and order via this link eBay will even pay me a few pennies in commission - which I guess is better that all this nonsense going behind a paywall!

This combination of new figures and new photographic kit has delivered up a large number of sets of photos, which I'll endeavour to post up over the next couple of weeks when I get a chance.

To start with, here are some cavalry made up mostly from Forged in Battle's WE-BE02 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Boukellarioi Heavy Cavalry set, with a few archer figures mixed in from WE-BE04 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Kavallarioi Bow.

These have mostly been done in Contrast paints, with a mix of GW and Warlord Games flavours on display. 

From memory the paints are:

• The horses are Aggaros Dunes, Snakebite Leather, Black Templar,Skeleton Horde (all GW) plus some Holy White (Warlord). The straps are all Warlord Hardened Leather. 
• Blazes and socks were added to the horses using a "Flat White" AK paint pen, which was very good for these sorts of additions, whilst not being as good for really fine detail as I had originally hoped. 
• I also used the pen to touch up some of the white clothing on these guys, which otherwise was done with Warlord's new Fanatic range Matt White.
• Armour was an experiment using Warlord's Enchanted Steel contrast (Speedpaint) on a white undercoat. It did come out a bit inconsistent in hue over the various painting sessions for these, which suggests it needs to be really well shaken before use.
• I then did some post-varnish drybrushing with Warlord Fanatic Gunmetal to give them a bit of shine on the chainmail and spear points, as the Enchanted Steel is quite grey on its own. 
• Spears and bows are my go-to colour of Vallejo 70.856 Ochre Brown
• The red clothing is Warlord Speedpaint Blood Red, or GW Blood Angels Red - they are essentially the same I think, especially at 15mm scale. 
• The blue on the serpent banner will be Frostheart, a GW contrast paint that is really striking. 
• The green shields are Mantis Warrior Green (GW). The contrasts generate a lot of depth and interest on these small flat surfaces I find.
• The more boring green quivers are Militarum Green (GW), with some in Frostheart with bits picked out in Vallejo Violet 70.960. 
• It's a bit OTT for quivers and bowcases, but going big on these bits it makes an otherwise dull view of the model a bit more interesting - and as I hope to mostly see them from the back as they advance and crush my opponents I feel justified in going a bit off-piste on the rear view of the figures from time to time!

More cavalry to come soon..

    

FiB Byantine Cavalry

 I've just bitten the bullet and sold off a load of Essex Minis 15mm Byzantines that I've had for the best part of 30 years.  There's nothing really wrong with them, but those Essex Early (Justinian) Byzantine cavalry figures are just so  dammed, well, ubiquitous that I've kinda grown bored of them more than anything else.

Add into that how my painting style has (hopefully) improved in the intervening 30-odd years and the end result has been that I've now embarked on the process of slowly buying and painting up a replacement set of mounted figures for this particular army.   

I've gone with Forged in Battle for them, mainly on the basis that I picked up some Middle/Late Roman almost-Byzantine cavalry a year or so back and really liked how they came out, so fancied adding in a few more from the range. 

And, here they are:

These are pack WE-BE01 "Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Boukellarioi EHC". 

They are billed as a random mix of 12 cavalry plus command, and as seems usual with FiB this means there is an extra command rider (making 13 riders and 12 horses)

There seems to be a bit of a mix of horse poses - not wildly different, just some slight variants of head position - with the standard riders all being the same.

The Command figures are a guy with a windsock standard, a commander with a mace (both pictured here) and a third guy holding a sword aloft, who I have saved for another project TBC. 

As these are being painted for an ADLG army where I'm likely to want to use one or two of these top-drawer units in each of 3 different commands, I chose to paint them up as a "2" and two "1s", so I can differentiate what bases are in which command more easily. 

This is the back of the Commander - the cloaks are done in a couple of Contrast paints, I believe Magos Purple and Shyish Purple - weirdly "Shyish" is the bolder darker colour of the pair. 

The horse armour is done in my traditional style of black undercoat and a Gunmetal drybrush on top. The horses have enough of a raised lip around the edge of the armour to allow a splash of colour to be added - in this case (imperial!) purple. 

You can clearly see the difference in the two units here - one being "blue" and the other "purple". 

This is the back view of the two "red" units - a variety of contrast paints for the horses, including Gore Grunta Fur, Snakebite Leather, Aggaros Dunes and the Warlord Contrast of Holy White on the grey horse. 

The straps were done in Warlord Leather, with a bit of extra "pseudo-blacklining" done with Warlord's Army Painter Dark Tone wash to pick them out a little more clearly - getting the Dark Tone on the armour doesn't really matter, so its fairly easy to flow it round the straps.

The rather spiffy shields are accidental - I used Yanden Yellow on a white base, and the flow of the Contrast paint just created this effect all by itself!