Iberian Warriors, Heavily Armoured

After a break painting, I can feel I am yet as good as I once was, but nevertheless i finished a few figures here today, and thought i would show them to the readers of this blog.

They are the heavily armed swordsmen from the Orion Iberian Infanty set. There is some controversy to the existance of this type of unit, as heavily armed Iberians is something that really does not fit in their style of fighting, which is guerilla warfare, basically. There is something about being heavily armored that just does not fit in with those tactics.

I guess one could assume that they have stolen the heavy armor from fallen romans, and that would explain the chainmail. They would then be troops fighting for Hannibal in the Punic wars, in Italy. Which is probably how I will use them when fielding them anyway.

The standard of sculpting is somewhat more lumpy than i am used to, having painted alot of HaT figures. These are the first troops I have painted from Orion, so the style is foreign to me. But I must say that i think that they overall are pretty good.  There was one figure that was alittle mismolded. The shields are supposed to be the Scutum, and the figure to the left in the picture below shows a shield that is improperly molded. The one to the right is how it is supposed to look.

The unit I have presented above, 10 figures all in all, is composed of 1 officer, 1 standard bearer (from a HaT command set), and 8 swordsmen. The swordsmen look like this up close.

I chose to paint them more or less like the box backside specifies. The picture is not that clear, and the shield design was not readily visible, so i had to use my imagination. It turned out OK, but nothing more than that. I am not good with engraved shields.

The officer was simple to paint. That is apart from his breastplate which seems to be less well defined on some of the officers. I expect I will show more pictures of this pose, later on, as more units have been painted. I think that the officer might be a Carthaginian, but he might be an Iberian. It´s hard to know for sure.

The standardbearer is as mentioned from the HaT Carthaginian Command set. He probably should have had a scutum instead of a round shield, but now i am just nitpicking my own choices. As you can see i tried to use the same shield design that the other Iberian warriors had.

Stay tuned for more Iberians.

~Claus

PS: I think I might be the first to paint up this set. I have not seen the pictures of these figures painted anywhere else.