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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