A Few More Assyrians

I needed a rest from painting Normans, so I thought I’d fill out my Assyrian army a little bit more.

When I started playing To The Strongest, I resurrected all the Ancients armies that I used to use for Vis Bellica, the only problem being that a VB element was approximately half the size of the elements I use for TTS. Not a problem for most of my armies, as I always over-collected on what I’d actually need to play a game, but it was for the Assyrians: the trouble being that as it was a small, expensive (in points terms) army, I didn’t have multiple identical VB elements that I could combine into a smaller number of TTS elements.

So here’s one TTS element (or, I suppose, two VB elements) of Assyrian heavy infantry, spearmen with big shields in front, archers behind. The figures are from Essex: always dependable figures that do exactly what it says on the tin!

The other issue with matching older figures is, of course, that one’s painting style changes over the years. These days I almost exclusively use Contrast paints, my Assyrians are painted using a black undercoat with acrylics on top , so I had to effectively re-learn how to paint that way. Annoyingly, I couldn’t get the cuirass to look as good as the figures I painted some fifteen years ago. I suppose I’ll just have to buy some more to get more practice in!