Campsite Curiosity: Achaemenid Away Camp

Here is the 'Away Camp' for my 

Early Achaemenid Persian DBA I/60 army. 

It represents a Persian camp in the style of the one described at Plataea. 

The photo story below covers the steps I followed in making the camp. 

We start with the basics of the camp being put together. 

A couple of close-ups of the detachable guard element:

The basic ground colours have been blocked in. I thought I'd add a sort of ditch/gutter full of putrid green water in front of the wall for a bit of colour. 

The two guards and the donkey are from Irregular Miniatures. The guy leading the donkey is from Minifigs.

 

Here the I’ve dry brushed the ground of the camp and the detachable element: 

 Then I painted the shield wall a dark red and added a light brown diamond pattern reminiscent of the pattern I gave the sparabarra shields. 

To finish off the day's work, I gave the ground a wash of diluted (1:4) burnt sienna ink:

When the ink was dry, I glooped on a pretty thick layer of PVA glue on top of the slime ditch to make it a little more watery, and let it dry.

I’ve then basically followed my usual basing procedure:

Step 1. Glue down some patches of Woodland Scenics Earth-blend T50 

Step 2. Glue down an odd number of patches of Heki static grass 'Summer' blend. 

Step 3. Glue down patches of Woodland Scenics clump foliage. 

Step 4. To finish up, placed some pretty arid looking Warpainter tufts.

When everything was dry, I added one final step. I touched up the diamond pattern with some lighter coloured paint to make it pop a little more:

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Hoplite Heresy

I’ve completed the Medizing hoplites for my Early Achaemenid Persian DBA I/60c army. 

The completed element:

I had already painted up an element of Greeks for the army but I decided that the shield designs, though historical enough, were too generic. I wanted them to relate more to the Medizing Greeks from the battle of Plataea.

The element began as some old Asgard hoplite standard bearers:

So I took the shield designs come from coins from some Greek cities that fought for the Persians at Plataea - especially Thebes. 

The urn and the club of Heracles come from Thebes, The bull's head is from Phocis and the horse is from Thessaly: 

The photos below show the steps I followed in creating the hoplite element.

I cleaned up the figures gave standard bearers some plastic spears:

The models were spray painted black:

The minis have had the basic colours blocked in. I've left some fairly wide black margins to help with shadowing & shading later on:

The figures below have had pretty much all of their shading & highlighting completed:

The next step was to block in the basic shapes for the shield decorations:

I ended up changing one of the white shields to green because I figured it would better suit the idea of a Thessalian horse galloping across a field:

The figures below show the completed shields. The Theban horse went better and more easily than I had anticipated but the seemingly more straightforward Theban club took several goes to get the colour right (hint: my original brown club looked…suspect).

With the individual figures clear varnished, it was time to base them up. 

First of all I used PVA glue to attach the figures onto a 2mm laser cut MDF base that I had painted black:

Secondly, a layer of Woodland Scenics Earthblend T50:

Then some patches of static grass:

Finally, some foliage clumps as bushes:

Here is the completed element after the glue has dried:

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