Xyston Takabara

 Earlier this summer I accidentally ordered some Persian Takabara infantry from Xyston, as part of a valiant effort to get value for money out of the postage costs of buying one piece of 15mm artillery from them (which you may have already seen ...).

This first photo shows their backs, as that is where most of the arty stuff is visible, as I did them with a base coat of GW Contrast, and then added double-spots with Army Painter fanatic colours - which didn't run into the Contrasts, much to my relief.

These are great little figures, and even better with LBMS transfers on their shields - although with 4 different sizes and shapes of shields and transfers, each of which is only slightly different, matching them up is a little tricky! 

Because the transfers might not always go on the right shields, its really important with these I found to blend in the edges of the transfers with paint - which I have done with all of the ones here. 

It proved a perfect excuse to get my Wet Pallette out again to do the blending, and a good self-justification for buying some of the ArmyPainter 6-part "triads" as well to blend an exact match for the LBMS transfers too. 

These guys are especially good IMO, with a base of Mantis Warrior Green with Pure Red and Daemonic Yellow dots. 

You may notice that a couple of the archers here are wearing Early Persian ceremonial dress - and are in fact Museum Z-sculpt figures, as it turned out I needed 12 archers to give each base 2 "support" shooters as well as the 4 spear/axe/sword armed troopers.

Anyways, I am really pleased with how they came out - there are some more photos of them in the Photo Gallery on this site. 

Yet more Xyston Persians - this time some cavalry

 As part of the same purchase as the Xyston Persin Bowmen, I also picked up some PSC rubbery Persian cavalry. 

I'd actually not checked the packdetails properly, and thought they were a mixed set but it turns out there were half a dozen armoured cavalry and half a dozen unarmoured horse archer types. I already have a couple of units of the armoured cavalry which I use as the Satrapal Guard, so - so instead of cooking up two different formations I intermingled the riders a little to make a rather more random mix of shooting and spear-using figures in different levels of armour. 

As usual with Contrasts, they have come out pretty brightly - even if my painting on these has been somewhat sloppier than for some recent projects given that they will appear infrequently as part of an all-cavalry Persian army composition. 

I have a lot of these units already from Xyston, and so I wanted this lot to have a colour palette that will allow me to differentiate them from the others so they can be used as part of a coherent command. This led to these guys having a lot of oranges, reds and yellows in the mix without being "uniformed" in any way. 

 For a bit of a bish bash bosh job I'm actually quite pleased with how they have turned out. 

Xyston Persian Bowmen

 Being unable to resist a bargain, I picked up these Xyston bowmen in a tabletop sale at the recent 1-day ADLG event in Reading.   

They are from the time when PSC were re-casting Xyston figures in Siocast rubbery resin (an experiment which by all accounts seems to have now run its course FWIW).

I reckon that Persians and other "Eastern" armies are perfect to get the best out of Contrast Paints, and these chaps have certainly come out pretty well both in terms of the vibrant "silk-like" colours and also with how the paint has flowed into the deep lines cast into the design of the figures 

Its most noticable from the back, where the leather armour comes up a real treat with a coat of Aggaros Dunes on a white undercoat base layer

With ADLG units being 6/base, this set of 16 also allowed me to eke out two units of light foot archers too

Looking at the army list I'm now not entirely sure where these guys will fit in, but I believe that some of the Successor armies get the odd Persian peasant archer unit too so I'm sure they will make an appearance some day. 

Lots of big moustaches!

My existing Persian infantry are Museum Z-Sculpts, which look great when ranked up in a dense formation but actually don't really stand up especially well when compared directly to the equivalent Xyston sculpts one-to-one

The Museum chaps are at the front, and are noticably slighter in build

More significantly however, the level of detail on the Museum castings is far shallower than on the Xyston sculpts, such that after even a thin layer of sprayed-on white base coat the detail on the Museum figures struggles to take the Contrast paints - whereas the exaggerated depths of the Xyston figures really allow this style of painting to "ping" 

It's not terminal - I'll still happily mix these in the same army, and same unit as well - but it is a reminder that different styles of sculpting work better with different paint techniques.

Totally Unarmed Slaves!

 OK, so you probably remember the Spartacus army that I finished earlier this year?

Well, actually it turns out that it wasn't entirely "finished" after all.

The L'Art de la Guerre Slave Revolt army list has an option for a couple of Mediocre Levy - totally unarmed, totally combat-ineffective bodies of peasants who just provide a smidgeon of moral support through their sheer mass. 

(And, at only 2 points each, they can help spend any left-over points up to the standard 200 point army limit in a list where everything else has a minimum cost of 4!).

So, having forgotten this when I based up the full army I ended up buying a couple of packs of Xyston Civilians from Donnington, and also some of Donningtons own new-casting Classical Civilians as well - and here they are:

OK - so I have 4 bases worth, not two. 

Well, I wanted some variety of figures, and it seemed a waste to only order 2 packs when there's minimum postage .. so, it sort of happened that I made up 4 bases worth. I guess that means they can look forward to being a hostage screen for the Timurids someday as well?

The Xyston and Donnington packs were surprisingly compatible - I'd been concerned they might be different in height or stature, but they actually integrate really well together with the Xyston folks having a lot of "women and children" and Donnington having some almost Senatorial Romans in togas.

As with the rest of the army these bases were a slap-chop + Contrast Paint project, in which the main challenge was to not go too crazy and upmarket on the colours of their clothing whilst still trying to make the figure's arms and faces stand out from what could easily be some very "beige" clothing options suitable for their low social status. 

All in all I'm very pleased with them - however if they ever end up featuring in a battle report you'll know something has gone badly wrong on the tabletop for the rest of the (fighting components of the) Spartacus army! 

Wiglaf Dark Ages 18mm Figures

I'd seen and heard a lot about the new Wiglaf Miniatures range from Dan Mersey, the rules author of several Dark Ages era games.

The range is nominally for The Age of Penda, designed for the wars of the seventh century AD Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and their enemies and is sculpted by Mark Copplestone, but with more than enough Viking/Saxon/Norman etc figures in my collection already to field a substantial European civil war, never mind a single army I'd been dithering for a while whether to pick some up mainly for comparison purposes.

Then, on Instagram, Dan popped up and said he has some sample bags available, so a quick Paypal transaction later and I soon had a set of 7 of the guys to have a go at painting them up. 

As you can see they are sharply cast models, nicely animated and with some non-generic poses. 

The figures with spears have been cast with open hands, which is always good now that so many of us have cottoned onto the idea of using wire spears or plastic broom bristles !

And here they are painted up and based - I did a kind of slap-chop approach on them in the main, with black undercoat and white drybrushing to give highlights to the paint, but with so much chainmail there's still a lot of drybrushed gunmetal on black anyway.

The chap with the fur cloak gets the wolfskin treatment in this lot.

And from the front at ground level. 

I'm not really all that satisfied with my efforts on the shields as the black lining is a bit sloppy in these closeups however all of the shields have multiple bosses, nails and metal strips designed into them which did rather cut across my simplistic painting approach, 

The big question with any new range of figures like these is "how do they compare to XXX manufacturer", so with that in mind here are the Wiglaf guys next to some Essex Feudal East European spearmen.   I think this pretty much nails the "are they really the 18mm they are marketed as?" debate with a resounding "yes". 

A few more manufacturers to compare - these are my Two Dragons Norman spearmen

Some Corvus Belli (now Plastic Soldier Company) 100YW dismounted knights

Figures from Xystons "biggest ever" (size wise) range of Roman-era Theurophoroi are about the only figures I have that stand up to the Wiglaf guys for size.

Bauda Carolingian spearmen.

So, all in all some very nice figures which are very characterful - and which I probably haven't managed to do full justice to with my painting either (althought with Steve Dean doing the brushwork on Dans own website that's also a pretty high bar to fall short of!). 

But, what is clear is that they are absolutely 18mm in height, so be careful which ranges you are looking to mix them with - or just go ahead and buy a whole army full from North Star!  

Dismounted Companions - or Hypaspists? Figures too nice not to use..

A rather lightweight painting session to share this time, as a set of the rather lovely Xyston Theban Generals and Leaders pack finally makes it onto the internet, based up here as some close formation infantry for various non-Theban armies.

These figures are really animated nicely, and having swapped them with Dave from The Podcast some time ago I'd been trying to work out what to do with them as I was reluctant to lose them in a wall of hoplites.  Eventually I settled on basing them as close formation infantry to act both as dismounted Companions, or as Alexanders Hypaspists (both in their Heavy Spearmen incarnation in ADLG).

This did also allow me to justify using a couple of Xyston mounted officer figures I had kicking around too, and, more importantly, to have yet another go at a multi-layer, grey base + white top layer "triad" type paint scheme to see if I could make white look, well, "interesting".   

And here they are, replete in their white cloaks and petruges.

I've yet to matt varnish the shields, which are gloss to take the VVV waterslide transfers, as it's been too cold to spray outside and anyway spraying 2 bases is a bit of a waste!

Here's the back view that shows the white layering. It's sort of there, but a bit less distinct than I had hoped. Somehow the lighter layers seem to blend into the base layers when I paint them, as if the darker paint bleeds into the lighter ones as I apply them - maybe I need to matt varnish between coats?

Anyway, they do look like boss-level dudes, so I'm happy with them!

Full Thracian Jacket

I've posted the individual units before, but here's a few pictures of the complete Thracian army all together.

They are almost all Xyston for the foot and generals, and Museum for the mounted troops. The only exceptions are that a few of the LF javelinmen are Corvis Belli gallic youths. 

Xyston can sometimes be really distinctive in style, but I think the Museum mounted look absolutely find set against them here.