Thracian Mercenaries

    Those are the somewhat recently released Warlord's Games 'Thracians with Romphaia' metal miniatures. I figured those would be quick to paint up but as usual it took longer than I anticipated. For the color scheme since they are professional mercenaries I went with the greys that they wore rather than the more individual tribal schemes. There are 4 individual sculpts, two with cloaks and two without, overall I really like those.

    I have also dug up a Relic miniatures metal I bought a long while ago, I knew it would make a great command figure and luckily it was a good fit scale wise too. The figure was made for Ancient Warfare Magazine based on an illustration by Johnny Schumate.

    And here they are all together. I have also got some Aventine Thracians and I am planning to get some Crusader Thracians too to get true variety in the two 16 men units I am planning to do.

 Thracian mercenaries 9/16 (D/S)

Batch of Macedonian Phalangites done (ish)!

      Those are 12 (out of 40) Warlord Games phalangites I just painted up. I decided to base them on thin plastic Rendra bases while my Immortal Miniatures will be based on thicker bases so that their heights roughly match. Though there is sand on the bases I am still going to add some foliage/greenery at some point.

    First two pictures are the four deep rank I am going to have the unit in while the third picture shows the guys in the back ranks. In the last pictures you can see helmet variations. To make sure this is not an army of clones I put in some extra work there, particularly the last guy on the right where I tried to give him that laurel wreath made gold, not sure whether you can tell though!

 

 

Up next will be Sudanese Tribesmen (still in the mail, use as Thracians with some conversions) and Warlord's Celts (converted to Galatians) which I am going to pick up from Norwich's Eastern Front game show along with Hail Caesar rulebook this Sunday!

Another batch of phalangites

These are the four test minis I've done already:

And this is the batch I am in the middle of:

Wargames Factory Persians WIP

So with the crazy discounts on Persian sprues I started a Persian army which I am going to use as army of Darius to fight Alexander and possibly later as some levies for Diadochi armies too (I'm thinking Seleucid). So far I've put few archers together and greenstuffed the shoulders so there is no crack where the arms and heads are attached.

First four Macedonian Phalangites

    I have made attempts at plastic phalanx before but I in the 1/72 scale with Zvezda's Macedonian Phalanx. However the sarissa was too flimsy and I was somewhat discouraged. Then I discovered these in 28mm scale and I knew I had to get some!

  There are only four poses but really to represent the phalanx it is more than enough. However I was disappointed that there was no pose where the sarissa can be positioned parallel to the ground (ei. what the first rank would do). These are slightly chunkier than the hoplites I have been doing so far but I think that I can swap heads from both sets easily enough.

  Each sprue allows four of these to be built so this is a test sprue run. There is a selection of 6 helmets on each and 6 sarissa poses (the two additional not shown have the Macedonians hold the sarissa by the buttspike). With 40 total that gives 10 sprues plus transfers. I went with white colour-scheme for the armour, yellow for pteruges detail and red for clothing. Though metal parts are gold I went with bronze (Chalkaspides-Bronze shields) (Citadel's Brazen Brass) to give them the standard rank-n-file look rather than make them look lite the elite phalanx (such as argyraspides which Warlord Games has a separate metal set for).

  I plan to use them in multiple armies, from Alexander to Pyrrhus to Diadochi up to Seleucids. Overall I am very happy with the detail and sculpt of these guys. Once I get all of my hoplites and these guys out of the way I can start getting some cavalry!

Molon labe! - The Spartans

'Come and take them'   

 These are the first five classical Spartans from Immortal Miniatures/Warlord Games I have painted. As you can see from last pictures they all have short hair as otherwise the heads wouldn't fit with the torso (all heads have short hair whereas some torsos have long hair). Therefore for my next five I used green stuff to give them long hair. These are done already, just waited to get painted at the moment.

Progress on the 'Immortal miniatures' hoplites

    This is the progress so far. There are 15 'classical' hoplites on the left (blue shields) from the 'classical hoplites' set set to represent Athenian forces of Peloponnesian War while the 25 hoplites on the right are meant to represent a  the '300' Spartans and 700 Thespians from Thermopolea.


Free-hand shield designs

    I really liked the transfers provided with these miniatures. However after applying them I found that they are quite shiny/reflect light unlike the normal paint. I am not sure if matt varnish would remove that shine but instead I decided to some free-hand designs. Here are two design from the Athenian hoplites.

Cloaks made from the 'Green-stuff'

    This was my first attempt at sculpting with the 'green-stuff'. It is not great but at least something to seperate this figure and add to variety in the phalanx. Below is my second attempt, this one a much shorter, I tried to go for a Thessalian type cloak.

The raised Corynthian helmet

     The Corynthian helmet hides the face of the hoplite so ideally the command figures could have the helmet resting on top of their head like the famous Pericles bust and in fact I set out to have a Pericles miniature that would lead the Athenian phalanx. This helmet option is not provided in the 'Immortal Miniatures' sets so I made my own version by cutting the top of the bare-headed head option and attaching the helmet on top, filling the gaps with green-stuff.

  Here are the results (I quite like the fact I did not use any metallic paints on the Pericles figure except for the spear points):

And another example on a different figure:

   These are just a few simple ideas to make the figures more unique.

Zvezda's 1/72 Macedonian cavalry

This is a slightly smaller scale (1/72) with multiple plastic figures. As I am writing this rather late at night I will just pose pictures and talk about them later so here are some companions with Alexander (Tarantines, Getai and Thracians will follow in another post).

Immortal hoplites

So I bought two of those bad boys- a classical and a 'normal' set. It seems that the 'normal set' represents the earlier hoplites such as those of the Persian wars whereas the second is appropriate for Peloponesian wars.

First thoughts:

I was a fan of this time period for a long time but never went into miniwargaming figures and instead stayed with 40k. I found other minis sluggish and ugly but these are perfect as so customizable, a longer review will follow once I get both sets painted up!