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The Otomi are mercenaries, which in ADLG terms are hard-charging Impetuous swordsmen.
The Fighting 15s ranges have limited poses in their "Otomi" bag so I added in a random scattering of chaps with obsidian-edged dangerous looking weaponry to make them a bit more fearsome.
These are more erratically coloured than my main set of guys, who have a lot more red on their limited items of clothing. These chaps are still mostly red, but with some exceptions.
For the obsidian I used a GW Contrast paint, Akhelian Blue, which is a translucent green/blue/purple colour that I thought was pretty distinctive and could be Obsidian-ish.
At some point I may go back to thee guys and see if I can gloss varnish the "obsidian" bits of the edges of their weapons to give them a bit more shine (after I have already matt varnished the lot after finishing painting).
A somewhat epic painting project has now finally reached the "lets spray varnish outside before it gets too cold and damp" phase of completion, much to the delight of vendors of multicoloured grass tufts, as my first Meso-American army finally gets finished off.
All of the figures (apart from a handful on the baggage element) are from the rather wonderful and characterful range sold by Fighting 15's - who sadly are kinda winding down their business, potentially selling off the moulds and rights at some point in future (we hope!).
These guys are from the same family as the Egyptians I own, and have bundles of personality baked into the sculpts. They are the sort of figures that really do make you wonder whether 3D modelling and printing, with its ability to make and print out anatomically accurate poses even at 15mm without the constraints of traditional sculpting or even the need to design figures that can be cast in, and removed from, rubber moulds, will ever quite capture the magic of what is very much a work of art rather than a 3D product develped by the technical application of science.
Anyways, I'll be posting pictures of the various troops in batches over the coming weeks, starting with the main body of Warriors.
These guys are a mishmash of different figure codes and are equipped with all sorts of weapons - as you'll see later on, there are some specific, names units who soak up most of the figures I bought with particular or specific weaponry, so these "standard" warriors are a bit of everything that was left.
The painting on these is a mix of contrasts and normal paints, with some of the new Warlord Fanatic normal paint "triads" of 6 (erm..?) slightly different tones as well.
The padded armour is white base coat with Aggaros Dunes GW Contrast, with the skin being a couple of applications of GW Contrasct Darkoath Flesh on a white undercoat.
The new fanatic paints give great coverage, and choosing some new, bold colours has allowed me to paint these chaps in the bright and vibrant colours you really do want to see on Meso Americans.
The two main sets I bought were a Green one, which ranged from Guardian Green to Ferocious Green, and a Red which ran through from Basilisk Red to Raging Rose - to which I added a few blues and a couple of even lighter colours too to use as highlights.
These sets of 6 paints are available on Amazon in the UK for a very reasonable £18 each set, with free postage (if you have Prime) - if you buy them through these links (6-part Triads on Amazon) I may even get a small kickback from Amazon's affiliate programme to!
This set of 6 units all have a big blob of red flowers on their bases to allow me to keep up to 3 commands woth of troops easily identified - or perhaps to say that some of the generic warriors are armed with atl-atl annd others (with different flowers) are not?
I didn't use any static grass on these, instead going entirely for grass tufts and flowers to try and create a more unique, jungle sort of vibe to the basing - after all, they will only ever fight alongside a handful of bases of Conquistadores, so they don't need to be all that compatible with my other armies.
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.
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.
The video is pretty straightforward (OK, "basic") and takes you stepwise through a set of simple techniques for quickly and effectively rebasing 15mm (or any scale really) figures that would work for any change from one ruleset to another.
Rebasing can often seem such a huge PITA that any ruleset that requires rebasing is instantly discarded, but I've now come to accept that it can be necessary, isn't that painful to do, and does actually leave me with better looking bases than the ones I was making 20-odd (or more!) years ago.
If you are baulking at the thought of rebasing troops for ADLG-R then hopefully this video will give you some confidence that it's not a life-threatening operation, and instead can be done quickly and easily to generate good end results.
And let's face it, these single units on 80mm x 40mm bases look really cool, and if you are honest with yourself you already have far too many 15mm Renaissance Pike and Shot based for other systems, so changing just a handful of 'other system' units will give you the half-dozen or so Pike & Shotte units you will need to play pretty much any nationality in ADLG-R (if you slot different flags onto the pikes)
The Successor army moves on apace, with the latest addition being 3 units of Cataphracts, making the later version of the Seleucids an option to use at a future event.
I already have some Gripping Beast fully armoured horse troops, which I painted up as Arab Ghilmen cavalry quite some time ago - however those figures were very wide, with the horse armour making it impossible to do the "wargames-standard" 4 figures to a base.
It was therefore with some trepidation that I picked up a box of GB's new Roman Cataphracts, only to be pleasantly surprised to find that they appear to have thinned-down the horses so it is almost - with caveats - possible to squeeze 4 of them together on a standard DBx-style 60mm wide base.
This feat of engineering was achieved with a bit of careful arrangement, slightly deeper than usual (50mm) bases, and some judicious use of the sprue clipper to remove any lower legs that were keeping the horses in the middle of each block too far apart.
It's surprisingly hard to notice the missing legs in this solid mass of metal.
Where I had cut the legs too high up the thigh, I also filled in some of the gaps with wood filler, painted it black and then drybrushed it to match the rest of the guys - which made an already hard to spot thing even harder.
This happy chap is yet to find a suitable shield transfer to go onto his standard. I have a feeling I may end up buying a sheet of white 25mm Successor shield "stars" from Veni Vidi Vici just to drop one on this standard (so if anyone has a spare please let me know!).
If you look really closely you can see that the standard bearer's demeanour appears not to be adversely impacted by the loss of one of his legs just above the knee, which is rather reminiscent of the legendary Peter Cook & Dudley Moore "Tarzan Audition" sketch!
I also used a lot of head swaps from the bits box for these - leaving the "Roman" heads out and adding in very "Greek" ones from Phalangites, Hoplites and Companion cavalry to emphasise their Greekness.
The second rate unit will be this one in bronze - the painting is a simple black spray base coat and drybrish with Vallejo Weapon Bronze, with the spears and faces undercoated in white before painting the colurs onto them.
The spears have a barbership sort of effect which is enhanced considerably IMO by the fairly simple addition of extra "rings" that break up the blocks of colour.
These are a dark brown initial ring around the lance, with a ring of ochre brown then painted inside it.
This breaks up the bit between the blocks of colour nicely, and also gives you a bit of leeway to even up the lengths of the blocks of colour when you've painted them by painting the dark brown ring over a bit more of one colour or the other in each case !
There is also a barely-visible coloured bit of cloth at the bottom of the horse armour - this too adds some subtle hinits of colour to the units
The final bit was to do some colour on the joiny-bit at the back of the horse armour (which may just be there ot hide the join line in the two halves of the horse !).
This also adds more subtle colour on what is an otherwise potentially rather one-tone figure.
So, 1 dozen cataphracts, all of which actually fit together in a solid block on 60mm frontages, and all for a very decent price too!
A few years ago (2019 to be exact) I won an unpainted army in a raffle at the L'Art de la Guerre Worlds in Rome. The figures were from Italian manufacturer Strategia Nova, and the prize was actually an Arab army, however as I have Arab figures in abundance I asked the guy who'd provided them if I could swap for a different army.
And, of the ones he had, the Slave Revolt army of Spartacus looked like the best bet!
