Painting - Mortal Gods Mercenary Hoplites - The white ones

This batch is 12 Warlord Games Hoplites (formerly Immortal miniatures I think), that I painted up for Owyn and I to play Mortal Gods from Footsore Miniatures. Owyn is currently studying ancient Greece and is fascinated by the Spartans and the mythology. We come from a family of historians, my parents are both published historians and history professors. The history bug has lain dormant in my boys up until this year. Rhys has become fascinated by WWII and now Owyn's new-found interest.

The astute among you may notice that there are 14 models below. The two command models were done separately and will be in another post.

I'll start off by saying that I do not like these models. I've very carefully used my sub-par photography skills to hide their flaws but, they are flawed. The heads are odd and too small. The spear arms are much longer than they should be. The shields are attached to the left arms, making them hard to paint once attached to the model.

The first six hoplites and their shields.

The shields are nice, big beefy hoplons which look the part, for a certainty. They do have some of the cloth shields that hang down under them, but I decided to go with a very classic look to keep Owyn's attention.

Here you can see the three body/armor types in the set. There are un-armored and bronze armored bodies but the vast majority of these are wearing linothorax. The crests are separate and there are quite a few different ones to choose from.

The second six hoplites and their shields.

The decals are Little Big Men and were easy to work with. For anyone who has never used them, they come with complete instructions and stick on but then are set with water. You are told to paint white under where the decal will go, and they do look much better when you do. I chose not to with this unit because I'm painting up two identical warbands and I wanted them to stand out as much as possible from the other band.

This band has white tunics, white and blue crests on their helmets and bronze shields. They will be stand-in Athenians until I get those painted up. The other band will have red tunics, red and white crests and the white painted under the decals on their shields. Those will be Owyn's Spartans until I get his actual Spartans painted up.

All in all these were not fun to put together and a little bit light on detail in places, but they painted quickly and look good, especially in groups. I like the Victrix better and they will be the rest of the plastic Greeks that I do. I have several metal Footsore Miniatures models and may buy some other metal models for various units, but I've always been a fan of plastics and Victrix is one of my favorite manufacturers.

All of this is in service of playing some Mortal Gods with Owyn. If I can digest the rules this morning then we'll be playing this afternoon.