Sumerians, the light troops

I am nearly done painting up the last figures for my Sumerian Army. The army consists of 3 boxes of HaT Sumerian Infantry and 2 boxes of HaT Sumerian Chariots. That is 276 foot figures, and 6 chariots. So painting all these figures has been somewhat of a project, and I have restarted it a couple of times.

I decided that I would present you with the army in stages, and then, hopefully make a picture of the whole army, when it´s complete. That may take some time though. The reason is that my wargames table doubles as a painting table, and at the moment it is a painting table. The 2nd reason is that I hate painting chariots. I don´t know why, and before I get completely burnt out on painting Sumerians, I have decided to allow myself a short break, painting some Iberians, before returning to the chariots.

All that said and done, here are the light troops of my Sumerian Army. First the slingers:

I have previously sent in a HaT contribution where these guys also appear. So if they seem familiar that is why. Not sure the green clothing is appropriate, but never the less, that is how i painted them. Here is a single figure in close-up.

Actually, this is two different figures, with the same paintjob. I got lazy and did not want to fiddle to much with my picture editing software today.

Then come the Nim skirmishers. According to one of my sources Nim means flies in Sumerian, and they are named Nim because they are like flies: everywhere and many of them. I mixed them with the Gutians that also came in the box. To me they both look like skirmishers, and they are equiped much the same, so I thought, why not.

Here are the pictures of the 4 different units that make up these skirmishers (48 figures in total).

The top and bottom pictures show the units I think have the most speculative clothing of them. I tried to keep the rest of the army in neutral, earth-like colors, but with the skirmishers I for some reason did not follow this pattern. I think it had to do with the fact that I got bored with doing those same color patterns, with only small variation, and needed to see some colors. Perhaps in the future, I should just paint up units that need to be colorful, when I get bored with painting the same type colors, instead of painting up units in ahistorical colors.

Here are a few close-ups of what on the HaT website are called the Nim skirmishers.

And finally, a few close-ups of the Gutians.

The clothing they have across their shoulder is supposed to be animal skins. Most likely sheepskin. That is why i painted the 2 of them a very whitish grey, to simulate this. On the two others I painted it a more generic fur color. As I assumed that these light infantry types really are hunters, and might have used other skin types.

Tomorrow I hope to show off some more Sumerians. I think they will be the more heavily armed ones, or maybe the specialist troops.

~Claus