Samnite Auxilia

I painted up some Samnite Auxilia, of the Linen Legion. I am going on the asumption that the legion included both light and heavy troops, as well as cavalry.

Here is a look at the unit.

They are not surpisingly white and silver in color. I tried taking the picture from an angle and alittle from above, to give an impression of depth. I think I succeeded. The unit does not look "flat", so mission accomplished.

Here is a look at the pose that is most numerous in the unit.

White on white is not the best way to bring out details. So I have used light grey as crest color, and a yellowish cream color for the back of the shield. I think it looks ok. The belt, sources show, are inlaid with silver or iron, so, I painted it silver.

Here is a look at the unit leader.

Not much to say about him really. Except that the difference in silver and iron is much more prominent on the pictures I have taken than in real life.

At the moment I have three units on the painting table. One Samnite Linen Legion heavy unit, One Samnite Cavalry, of the Linen Legion too, and a unit of Iberian Caetrati. The two first are HaT products, the latter is all Orion figures. So those are the coming attractons!

~Claus

More Oscan Auxilia

Once again a unit of Oscans have run past my Iberians waiting on the painting table. This time it is another unit of Auxilia. Auxilia by the way is latin for "It helps", meaning they are not part of the regular army, but more a reserve of some sort, that helps out in times of war.

Here is the unit:

This time I chose a more fitting uniform than the first unit got. The dress here is definately more Oscan, and the shield design is too more Oscan than before. This one can be seen on the box art, that is, apart from the inverted E i painted on, which should be replaced by a wolf. Since my painting skills do not make it possible for me to paint that many identical wolfheads on a shield I chose to paint the letter the Oscans used for E, and that is the inverted E.

Three conversions are present in the line-up of figures. They are simple headswaps. Can you find them? The 11 figures are all of the same pose, with 3 of the 11 being the conversions. There is also the Oscan officer painted in the scheme of the unit as well. 12 figures all in all.

Here is a close-up of the common figure in the bunch.

The belt is shown in all illustrations I could find, as being golden or gold, but I found that it was not to far fetched that it could be leather. This fellow too is barefooted. I could have made the edges of his sleeves white too I guess, but I went with a simpler design.

Here is a close-up of the officer figure.

I think I could have painted him a bit better. There are some edges along the armor on the backside that seem to have been guilded. That is golden paint has run out on the cloth. Not very professional of me, I guess. The camera really catches all those small faults you do not notice when painting, even in bright light.

A bit of info on the Oscans I guess is appropriate. Especially since I did not give any in the last post. They are an Italian Oscan speaking collection of tribes, that lived south of Rome, basically. The most numerous of them were the Samnite League, which I have yet to paint any of. These Oscans here are just meant to be general Oscans. They wrote from Right to Left. That is opposite of the direction you are reading this. They were eventually conquored by the Romans, but there were several big wars. The Samnite wars being the most known. There were three of them.

Oh and did you find the conversions? If not here they are.

The figure to the left is perhaps the worst one of the lot. His head and neck has a sort of platform that I forgot to remove before attaching the head to the body. The two others have the same heads as the "Officer". You got 8 of the "officer" pose per package of HäT Italian Allies, and I somehow managed to pick up 7½ packages. (Two of them just recently.... I should really have checked how many I already had).

~Claus

Oscan Auxilia

A bit in from left field is here a post about my recently painted Oscan Auxiliaries. To be honest I got a little bored painting the Iberians, and thought a change of pace would be fine. Better to be painting something than nothing at all.

So here they are. A single unit. 12 men, 2 poses. Or rather one pose, and an officer. I more or less painted these from imagination, rather than a historical source. Then I check the sources and tried to make up for my blunders. A smaller blunder of mine is that perhaps the Oscans never really wore shoes. The officer is clearly wearing some, so perhaps I should have painted them skin color, so he would be barefoot like the rest of them.

Another blunder can be seen on this shield design. Not sure that this color combination ever occured. So to make up for it, I thought I would put a symbol on the shields that was definately Oscan. Turns out its hard to find symbols. Then I got a brainchild, what if I used part of the Oscan Alphabet. And sure enough, it was less hard to find the ancient Oscan alphabet. So I used one of the 21 letters they had as a symbol. A V with a dot in it.

The officer is perhaps not an officer, but just another Oscan. However he is heavily armored and with a cupped hand. I put a sword in it. The shield is also glued on. Both are from the HäT set which these figures are from.

This is then a small unit, by some standards, of just 12 men, but with just one pose it felt like there where more, when painting them. The standard pose is unarmored, and just has a shield and spear, so they are Auxilia. They are basically painted generically enough to represent any Oscan tribe, the tribes of ancient Italy, before Rome took all of it.

~Claus