Alan Cavalry

 The FiB Steppe Warrior fest continues with these Alan cavalry, who have shields and short(er) spears.

I believe they are Alan Cavalry, reference number WE-SA05 in the FiB Catalogue.  

There are no shield transfers for this lot, so I had to do some old-school "painting of designs" - which is also what happened with many of the Byzantine cavalry I painted last year. 

The patterns are mostly based on Alan symbols - it's not just random you know! 

They've ended up as being quite jolly - originally I was considering just plain shields, but the combination of the high opacity of the newer Fanatic paints and a new brush seems to have allowed me to do some reasonably simple symbols and make them look better by adding lines and circles of dots around and across the shields - so they may get more game time than I was originally thinking!  

Sarmatian Medium Cavalry Bowmen

 The FiB Sarmatian-fest continues with some "Medium" cavalry - aka "unarmoured", "standard", "generic" or whatever. I'm not even sure which packs they came from, but anyways, they are mostly armed with short spears held in their hands, no shield, and a bowcase and bow on their hips. 

I'm not sure if this is a muted pallette or a bold one- there's quite a lot of GW Contrast Militarum Green in there, but also some pale blue "Frostheart" and the odd bit of normal painting going on as well. 

I have - like the Skythian Nobles - also added some "spots within spots" to make them look a little more, erm Skythian. 

Here you can start to see the bowcases - I have a good number of unarmoured cavalry firing bows, and two of them have made it into this set of 4 bases, but I prefer to use them on Light Horse bases if I can, so I didn't quite have enough to include one shooter per base in this lot.

Unusually I have gone for a pretty random mix of hair colours too - I always suspect there is a "right" mix of colouurs to aim for given the origins of troops like these, but that is probably "mostly black", which is a tad dull - and with many of these castings having bowl-style haircuts it can soon look like  The Beatles are riding into battle - which is not a great look TBH. 

They are now ready to go and confuse my enemies who will no doubt think they are armed with "light spear" instead of bows! 

Horse Archers

 So far I have only painted up a handful of Light Horse for my Sarmatian (etc..) army - so these three are the start of probably half a dozen or more bases.

All are bare headed, as I used the guys with helmets to sprinkle into the Heavy Cavalry with lances and bows. 

Some of these figures are carrying a short spear as well as a bowcase. 

They have nice clear faces - unlike some of the armoured lancers, some of whom have faces that are a bit lost under their helmets.  

Again I worked on a fairly muted palette with some splashes of interest and colour, using a combination of Contrasts and layers triads on different parts of each figure. 

More to come ... eventually! 

Sarmatian Medium Cavalry

 These FiB lancers have been painted with leather armour instead of metal - the figures are the same as some of the "heavy cavalry" I posted last week, just the paint is different! 

I also adopted a mostly-blue palette for the cloaks, again to help make them more easily distinguished from the other riders in what is most probably going to be a mostly "Heavy Cavalry" army.

These are pretty much all lance-only riders. 

They also have a swordsman on each base too - FiB are more than generous with command figures in their packs, such that I often end up with too many. 

That allows me to use the sword-armed guys to provide a little more unique (and easily seen) character to some of the units. 

Sarmatian Heavy Cavalry

 The next set of Sarmatians from my FiB painting marathon are these "Elite Heavy Cavalry" 

Using the visual key of "an armoured horse on each base", and all-metal armoured riders, this lot have 3 lanncers on every base as well so they can be identified as being primarily hard-charging Impact cavalry.   

In fact, not just "3 lancers", but "2 upright and one at 45 degrees" lancers!

Some of the FiB "cataphract" horses have edging to the armour that can be painted to give a bit of extra colour - like the guy bottom left of this photo. 

Whilst these are all armed with lance, you can see that some of the riders are sculpted with a bow and bowcase (and arrows) on their backs - so if I am using an all-mounted-shooting army they are still legitimate troops to drop on table as a discretely identifiable set of figures (ie in one command) 

This set of 4 bases all have a bowman on each base as well as 2 lancer figures.

The archers from FiB don't have armour, but these ones do have metal helmets so they can fit in with the "Heavy Cavalry" ethos of this little set of 12 guys perfectly well. 

Again, plenty of bow cases and arrows on their backs too. 

More to come soon..

The Sarmatians Ride !

Just after FiB's rather chunky price increase (1/3 reduction in figures per pack, but no price change) hit the shelves, I managed to find a seller on eBay who was offering "full size" Forged in Battle Army Packs with the "old" numbers of figures per pack as well  - effectively making them 1/3 cheaper than buying from FiB direct. 

Having sold a rather old Khurasan Avar army on eBay earlier this year I had been meaning to replace such an army in my "Steppe tribes" collection anyway, so the combination of this and the FiB price hike/cheap deal ended up being the trigger moment for what has turned out to be a substantial purchase of 4-legged lance and bow armed Steppe tribesmen.

And here is the first tranche of a LOT of cavalry !! 

Having picked up a few extra packets of cavalry at Entoyment too (also at the old prices) I somehow ended up with well over 100 cavalry .. which meant I defaulted to production-line painting of the horses so I could bash through a load of them before even starting on the riders. 

These FiB sculpts are both great (in that they are pretty varied and dynamic) yet also they are starting to look a little tired, with some exhibiting casting lines, flash and occasionally twisted legs too. 

This however ended up being something I managed to turn to my advantege when painting so many horses in a batch, as it allowed me to adopt a technique that means I could be sloppy with the fiddly bits - the reins. 

Initially all the horses were undercoated in white, after which they were done in variety of GW contrasts (Aggaros Dunes, Gore Grunta Fur, Skeleton Horde, Temnplar Black Cygor Brown), with some greys in Army Painter Holy White - all whist trying to leave the (often hard to see) reins unpainted wherever I could. 

I then went back over all of them with a thin brush and standard white paint to vaguely (ie not all that accurately) pick out some more of the reins where they could be easily seen (not always easy on these castings), and then used either Army Painter Hardened Leather, or (for the "brown" horses) GW Contrast Miltarum Green to go over and pick out the now-white straps and reins, using these two paints to also "blackline" the reins and make them stand out against what was usually some variation of tan or brown horse flesh. 

This (I think) looks effective, and is pretty easy to do quickly - unlike, say, Essex horses where the straps and really well defined and stand out some way from the horses themselves, which requires more careful painting to not look messy.

 I also did a lot of variation in the saddle cloths - of course this is mostly hidden when the riders are on, but it is not hard to do and gives them that little bit extra pzazz if you do look closely at the finish figures.

 And here are some of them now:

These are "included commanders" - a mix of all sorts of packs of figures really.

 

My "system" for these has been to put at least one "armoured" horse on each base to denote "Elite Heavy Cavalry".

Pretty much  all of these riders have metal armour using ArmyPainter Enchanted Steel, which for this army I then toned down with a wash of ArmyPainter Dark Tone on the metalwork, as for some reason the Enchanted Steel was coming out more pale grey than usual (perhaps the heat of the last few weeks?) 

I've not gone for striped windsocks, mostly as I find they can easily ends up looking like a refugees from Finding Nemo. 

These are two bases of Medium Cavalry Archers - the lack of metal armour on the riders bodies, all three horses being unarmoured, and having a firing, bareheaded bowman on each base being the visual clues for myself and my opponents.

On the far set of horses the "self-blacklining" effect of the ArmyPainter Leather on the straps can clearly be seen. The fronts of the horses are where the casting of the reins seems to go most awry, but luckily most of the horses are "head down" so on the tabletop it's barely visible if at all. 

I've also tried to keep to a muted palette on these - mostly tans and khaki-greens with the occasional splashes of colour with a blue cloak or ed tunic here and there.

Many more to come ! 
 

Forged in Battle Late Romans

 It was only fairly recently that I realised that I didn't actually own any proper "Late Roman" legionaries. 

I've got Lorica Segmenta guys with square shields, Republican mail-clad chaps, Middle Roman half-way curved shield dudes, and some early Byzantine spearmen who have stood in for very late Romans in the past.. but none of the actual Late Roman/Patrician guys at all. 

So rectifying that became a bit of a mission, especially after I somehow acquired some Forged in Battle LBMS transfers for Late Roman Legionaries - that I of course could not bear to waste!

And, after a bit of painting and purchasing, here is the finished result:

I now have some Legionaries who, thanks to LBMS, look exactly like everyone elses!

These are mostly from the mail-clad set from FiB, with a couple of leather-cuirass guys in there - most notably the chap at the front leaning on his shield, who is IMO by far and away the best figure in any of the FiB Late Roman packs. 

I have squeezed a couple more leather guys in the rear rank, so as to get 4 bases (32 figures) of "quality" legionaries and then 16 figures of all-leather "2nd string" ones out of the two packs I bought. 

Top down view.

Here is a more simple shield - easier to blend in the transfer from a brushstroke POV, but still a little challenging in terms of paint matching, as the transfer is really very, very vibrant and none of my collection of Reds quite managed to match it perfectly.  

Once the figures have been matt varnished it looks a lot better, but if you look closely you can see the painted in edges.

These are the leather-only chaps, with a less inspiring (or less "real-looking") shield design too. They also got black crests to make them even more less imposing. 

The poses in these sets are a little underwhelming TBH, and I also found the faces to be very small, often on many of them a little too small to do my latest "blob for the nose, cheekbones and chin" face painting style - however the GW Darkoath Flesh base coat seems to pick them out almost well enough anyway. 

As there was so much Hardened Leather Army Painter Speedpaint on these, the straps were done in GW Militarum Green contrast so it would stand out against the leather armour. 

So, I now own 48 Very Late Imperial / Patrician Legionaries !