Over the past few weeks and months, I've been working on the first few minis for a Macedonian range. With my first unit painted, and with new command figures on the way very soon, I thought I would start to look at what else might be nice to include in the army...
One of the mainstays of a Macedonian army are Phalangites. Rows upon rows of pikes, all neatly lined up ready to tie down whoever is foolish enough to fight them to the front! However, I was looking in the display cabinet the other day and my Greek Hoplites kept looking at me, begging to be completed. Now these guys have been sat, painted and based but without shields since last year. We recently released some shield transfers for the Macedonians and I thought it would be an interesting idea to use some of those transfers and repurpose them for the Greeks that have been waiting oh so long.
One of the most frustrating things about ancient history is the lack of solid evidence (that everyone can agree on!) for certain information, such as equipment and tactics used on the field of battle, but in this case, I have used it to my advantage!
Shield designs are one of those things that we all have an opinion about. Did they all have the same design? What designs did they use? Were shields issued? One of the things that is for certain is that we don't know for sure, so this is my depiction of some Greek Mercenaries in the service of the Macedonians.
My thinking behind doing the shields like this are made with a few things in mind. The first is that I understand it was very likely shield designs were specific to each individual earlier on in Greek warfare. If this was the case at least in one point of history, I think it is reasonable to assume certain mercenaries could have carried their own shields and could have had plenty of different designs to identify them in battle so they could claim glory or be easily identified if things went wrong! The second is that the designs I have used are covered with stars (the Vergina Sun) and symbols that are typically associated with the Macedonians and Successors. Shields with familiar designs like this this may have been given to troops hastily drafted so that they weren't misidentified in the heat of battle. In any case, I believe I have a good basis to use these designs, and I think they work really well!
So, enough talk, lets get to how I finished these shields!
The first thing that needed to be done was prepping the shields. This was easy as all that I needed to do was clean up the shields and spray them white. I also sprayed the inside of the shields brown to save me time painting later!
Using waterslide transfers can be a bit of a finicky job, but these transfers were durable enough to give me plenty of working time to get them in the exact position I wanted before I used my fingers and a brush to take out any creases and make them nice an conformed to the shields.
As I mentioned earlier, these transfers are made to fit on the smaller Macedonian Phalangite shields, and so there was plenty of white space left between the face of the shield and what would be the bronze rim.
Although as you can see, these transfers still suit the larger shields well and these Greek Hoplites are already starting to look the part!
The next stage took a bit of time and a steady hand, but I finished this off in just under two hours, which I think is time well spent for the result I got with these guys.
I filled in the white space on the shields that needed it with the colour that matched the shield facing and then tidied up the rims after with the same bronze colour I used on the armour of the Hoplites themselves.
All that needs to be done now is the movement tray and I will also make the bases a bit prettier with some tufts and an extra highlight!
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