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. 

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!

 

 

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.

Three new ADLG Renaissance Battle Report Videos

I've just finished uploading the three Video Battle reports from the Central London 1-day ADLG Renaissance competition held earlier this year.

In them my Louis XIV army takes on the Swedes, more French and the Ottomans in three (as always) decisive and brutal struggles in the Age of Gunpowder & Reason.

All three reports can be seen on my YouTube channel 

• Louis XIV vs The Swedes

• Louis XIV vs The TYW French  

• Louis XIV vs The Ottomans

My army list is also available here:

28mm Thracians

 I've already got a few Thracian infantry, enough to make an allied contingent for many ADLG armies, but I did want to add some light horse, cavalry and light foot to the roster - and so here they are.

These are Victrix plastics done very quickly with Contrast paints. The funky Thracian shield pattern is actually half of a 15mm shield transfer onto which I've painted the whites and, erm, "reds" of a pair of eyes. 

I didn't quite have enough "Thracian" shields going spare so some of these chaps have picked up Successor cavalry shields (and matching LBMS transfers) to make this a semi-mercenary unit, depending on which way round you look at it from. 

I also seem to have gotten some form of gunk on the back of this guys tunic (in the grey - which is Warlord Holy White on a white undercoat), which is a bit of a PITA as I must have missed it earlier in the process.

Very chuffed with the arm muscle definition on this one with the sword. Flesh "normal" paint on a Contrast base layer of Darkoath Flesh on white undercoat.

The figures have great faces using the Thracian / Dacian heads from another sprue 

These are the cavalry - again using Dacian heads, and this time a mix of Gallic and Successor shields. The chap in the middle may be a Greek Cavalry body but I seem to have an odd number of them and the Gallic armoured horsemen so perhaps I swapped sprues with someone at some point?  

The horses work really well I think with these contrast paints on a white base. 

 

As do the cloaks

 

Great animation on the faces from Victrix that the contrasts (+ drybrushing) really pick out well 

 

I also added a couple of bases of light foot javelinmen to give the contingent some dedicated (very) rough terrain troops.

 

Again 15mm Gallic VVV shield transfers provide a template for an "eyes" effect shield design 

The painted-on musculature rounds them off quite nicely. 

It's a Camel!

Here's a 28mm baggage camel that I've had kicking around in the "to be painted" pile for a while now. 

I believe it comes from Disain Studios, and I may have picked it up at the PAW show last year - but I can't seem to find this design on their website so perhaps it's a show-only thing? 

I also had a spare Gripping Beast Arab swordsman lying around who didn't fit on any of the bases I did of Arabs a few years ago, so he has now become a baggage guard. 

He has a rather large and fragile sword, so I positioned him so it is touching the camel. A bit of  superglue later to glue the sword blade to the side of the camel and it's now a lot more robust than it was ! 

The camel had no base, just feet, so I had to drill a pin into one of the feet to give it stability on the base. Printed resin is easy to drill, which is handy in  this case. 

The camel itself is done in Aggaros Dunes GWContrast paint on a black base with heavy white drybrush highlights - or "slap chop" if you are down with the kids apparently!

A few more 28mm Hellenistics

 Slowly making their way to the "done" pile of my 28mm Successor and Hellenistic project are some more pikemen, and a rather random find of what I suspect may be very old Wargames Factory Hoplites 

These are the second base of Mercenary pikemen - another great set of LBMS shields

This time I elected to do a few more of the edges in colour, rather than aimong to put metallic rims on them all 

They still have a lot of random heads though, as befits a random collection of Mediterranian mercenaries 

A LOT of different headear going on here 

And with the full set of, erm, one other base. 

The Elite Argyaspids also got a second base of pikemen

The new base doesn't have the commander and standard bearer figures on it 

These are the slightly smaller and slighter hoplites - I ended up with 24 of them pre-made but unpainted 

Shields are LBMS and some upscaled homw brew waterslide transfers using images found online 

At this stage I'd just used Darkoath Flesh as the flesh - no highlights on these - but I did add some flesh paint highlights lafter this was taken

They are all about the shields really - but honestly the Victrix figures of today are much nicer

Even a few left over to do an officer base (as I could only fit 7 on each 60mm base really)