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Quite a few years ago I got a Samurai army painted up professionally by Simon Clarke's Lurkio painting shop - the only army in my collection to be painted by someone else. This was mainly as I really didn't fancy (aka didn't think I was good enough) to paint up a Samurai army and do it justice.
In the process of deciding what figures to get painted though, I did buy a few different ranges before finally settling on Old Glory - and in a recent trawl through the spares box I happened to come across a few baggies of Essex Samurai that I'd considered and then rejected for the army.
Having succesfully added some much easier to paint Light Infantry Ashigaru archers to the army last year, for some reason when I found these actual Samurai I decided that I might actually have a go at these figures too, and see if I could now paint them to a standard which was something even vaguely close to the pro-paint job on the rest of the Samurai in the army.
First posted on 23 July 2024 | 5:40 pm
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.
First posted on 16 July 2024 | 5:27 pm
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:
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.
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!
First posted on 9 July 2024 | 3:09 pm
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.
First posted on 4 July 2024 | 3:06 pm
I've just finished uploading the three Video Battle reports from the Central London 1-day ADLG Renaissance competition held earlier this year.
First posted on 20 June 2024 | 6:07 pm
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.
First posted on 13 June 2024 | 9:00 pm
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