More from Sumer!

One of my new year’s resolutions was to mix painting newly-bought figures with those forming the considerable lead mountain that haunts my dreams.

One significant component of the lead mountain is made up of the final units needed to complete a particular army, and one example of that has been, for quite a long time, the final unit of spearmen for my Sumerians.

Playing To The Strongest at 130 points, the Sumerians (or Akkadians or any other city state from around that time) definitely need four deep units of spearmen, and could really do with five, and maybe sometimes need six. I had five, and at 48 figures per unit, that meant I’d already painted 240 of the little devils. Hardly surprising that at that point I ran out of steam and couldn’t finish the sixth.

Those poor spearmen from the sixth battalion had been sat on my painting table, in a tray, trying to guilt me into painting them for over two years so, as I waited for the next batch of vehicles to finally finish motorising my WW2 Poles to arrive, I thought that they would be the next chunk dug out of the lead mountain.

And what a pleasure it turned out to be. I had forgotten how much fun it was to paint these chaps: all from Museum Miniatures’ excellent CAD designed Z Range. Basing them was still the same old pain (all those spears need to interlock), and I couldn’t remember how I painted the equids pulling the war wagon, but it was still a refreshing change from Poles, Cossacks or even Polish Cossacks!

And I cleared a space on the painting table too!