Athenian hoplites

Before it went on hiatus, my ‘Greek myth’ project continued with a set of Victrix Hoplites. 

These are very nice multi-part figures. The poses are limited but the upside to this is that the individual miniatures work well as a unit. They come with cast-on bases but I put mine on larger round bases from Renedra:

Here are the first two batches, based with Das putty covered in sand. There are also Games Workshop minotaur and medusa figures, and a giant scorpion from Ral Partha (I think), which have all been sat in the loft for twenty-odd years. More about those in future posts!

* EDIT: the scorpion was made by Grenadier, not Ral Partha! *

And here they are, undercoated and ready to paint. My tip of the day is…

…don’t use grey spray primer. It was all I had at the time but it made life unnecessarily difficult. The primer kept showing through the base colours so I had to paint most of the miniatures twice to make the colours solid. It was especially tedious with white, which got three coats in places.

I was on the verge of abandoning the project altogether at this point:

Fortunately, adding some details and a few washes of paint improved them:

After a bit of research into what Hoplite shields were made of, I painted the reverse of the shields separately then glued them to the miniatures. I then painted the shield fronts white, ready to accept the decals. The decals are from Battle Flag’s ancients range and fit the shields perfectly. One great advantage of the shield designs is that the eye goes straight to them, diverting attention away from a so-so paint job.

Here are the finished miniatures:

For some reason the chap in the middle reminds me of Matthew Kelly during his stint on ‘Game for a Laugh’…