15 mm Greek Hoplites (Essex)

Introduction

Decades ago (and I am not kidding) I bought a sample from a professional figure painter. It was a "adjusted" figure from Essex Miniatures MPA27 Later Hoplite Greek: Theban Hoplites Boitian helmet. The over arm pose had been changed to "at rest" (spear vertical) by bending the throwing arm. I never did buy more than the sample, but I kept it to use as inspiration.

More recently, I've decided to morph my Later Macedonian Art de la Guerre (ADLG) army into a Pyrrhic army. This requires some elephants, a few slingers, some later cavalry, and some hoplites.

The Later Macedonian army lacks units with "punch". It does best when the pike can pin a target and grind their way trough it, but, as the army is quite small, this can leave the flanks of the pike very vulnerable. The elephants will add some "punch" and the hoplites will add width (I hope).

Luckily, one of my mates found some Essex hoplites, and a few Freikorps command figures, in his loft. Money changed hands, and now they are all painted.

Painting & basing

As you may see, I used a slightly different skin highlight; tanned & pink flesh rather than my usual tanned & pale (cream) flesh. I also adopted the "butchers diagram" style of highlighting the skin. Up close it's very like a cartoon, but at arms length it's an effective way of adding definition. I suppose it's reminiscent of Kevin Dallimore's very early work in 28 mm.

I chose to base all the hoplites with crested helmets together rather than a random mix on each base. This allows me to downgrade up to two units to mediocre (to save a few points), and spot them easily on the table.

I decided against basing the figures on DBx standard 40 by 15 mm bases and went with 40 by 30 mm bases which are correct for Art de la Guerre (ADLG) heavy infantry. I may not do this again as dry brushing the centre of the base was a nightmare: very tight.

Finally, I used a few of the leftover figures to create an ADLG infantry command base on a 40 mm plywood round base. I added a under layer of heavy duty, magnetic vinyl to aid transportation. One of the figures is on a piece of slate from my garden to make it look like he is standing on a mound surveying the battlefield. I'm not sure it has worked that well, but it's done now.

Figure review

The Essex figures are a mix of MPA25/26 & 27 with both Essex & Freikorps command figures.

All the hoplites had their arms bent (carefully) with a pair of thin nosed pliers. I put a folded bit of thin card in the jaws of the pliers to prevent the pliers marking the casting.

The arms bent easily enough because of the soft metal Essex use. The hardest bit is twisting the wrist so the hand is in the right position. I'd like to describe exactly how I did it, but each arm seemed to require a different sequence of bends and twists.

The figures came with separate cast spears and I decided not to replace them. I may regret this.

In general the hoplites are what you'd expect from Essex. My only issue was with the toes; they weren't well defined at all. There's a lot of three and four-toed hoplites in this unit.

I painted two Freikorps commanders and one trumpeter. They are the same height as the the Essex figures so they fit reasonably well. The trumpeter was a bit thin and crude, but I want to commend the Freikorps commander figure to you: it was a joy to paint. The detail was so deep, highlighting the armour was the work of seconds.

The main issue was painting the shields. This deserves a section of its own.

Tips for freehand shield designs

If you look closely you will spot two shields emblazoned with urns. These are transfers; all the rest are hand painted. 

I didn't want to use transfers because the Essex hoplite shields are too "dished" to take a transfer without a lot of swearing, and faffing about. In truth, felt I had little choice but to paint the majority of the designs freehand.

When preparing the figures, I recommend smoothing the shields with a fine emery paper, or similar, to remove minor blemishes and fine mould lines.

The shields on the Essex figures don't have rims. At first this didn't bother me and I painted a few rimless designs. However, I found that adding a painted rim was a simple way to introduce more variety by different colour combinations (rim, ground, and design). I am now very good at painting circles.

There's a lot of visual inspiration available on the Internet:

• By far the most comprehensive source I found was from Luke Ueda-Sarson's Wargaming Pages. His pages offer a very useful compendium of patterns and colour schemes especially for the Classical Greek period. Highly recommended.

• For even more visual inspiration I recommend you search for the transfers available from Little Big Man Studios; not least because their interpretation of the classical hoplite designs is very painter friendly. I found six sheets of hoplite shield patterns and one of shield aprons. A very useful resource. I'm not even sure I found all that LBM produce.

The trick is to select the right patterns and colour schemes. I settled on three or four simple designs that I felt I had a chance of drawing freehand.

Some designs were easy enough to paint; the trident and multiple circles for example. My standard approach is to outline the design in a darker (shade) colour before adding the final (highlight) colour. The darker colour is more forgiving due to the reduced contrast and is easier to fine tune.

Other designs required a finer touch: enter the SAKURA Pigma Micron Fineliners. The 01 is excellent for detailed work. The birds (eagles?) were drawn solely with the pens. The snake designs where drawn with the pens then finished with a brush.

I found it necessary to practice drawing the designs on paper first. I created a sheet of 9 mm circles for this. I started with a pencil before trying different sized Fineliners.

In my experience there's an optimum sequence of pen strokes for each design, and it's important to start with a "stick" framework. The latter is crucial as it helps you centre the designs. To my surprise, I found the sequence I tried first was seldom the best. It is important to experiment with approaches beyond the obvious.

It is also important to give the base paint layer(s) at least 24 hours to dry & harden. You can easily create furrows "soft" paint which looks dry but hasn't had time to harden. This is most likely to happen if you are drawing on top of multiple layers of paint like I do.

Some care is required to protect "pen-only" designs when varnishing. I had a few where the spirit based varnish I use lifted specks from the design. Easily fixed, but annoying. I have started using an aqueous varnish first just on the shields.

Closing remarks

My collection of Hellenistic units increases yet again; twelve months after I thought I'd finished the project. I am currently working on a couple of units of cavalry, but I think the infantry are pretty much done except for four units of Galatians. These are way down in the painting queue. Maybe next year?

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