The Achaemenid Persian Empire thrived from558 BCE to 330 BCE and was the largest empire of the ancient world.They are largely remembered for battling the Greeks, notably during the Battle of Thermopylae.I've also painted these adversaries in the following articles:
To the right are photos of the Persian Light Cavalry on unarmored horse.They include the Paphlogonian and Arachosian javelin men.I just like saying those names.Click on the photos to see larger versions.
The figures are painted mostly withReaper Master Series paints.I use Reaper, Vallejo, Foundry, and many other paints.I like Reaper because of the wide range of colors, the eye-dropper squeezey bottle witha mixing pellet, and the thin fine nature of the paints.Some of the bronze armor is Vallejo bronze, a nice dark golden brownish color.Much of the speartips and chain mail is Games Workshop Citadel Colors - some of thebest metallics.
I painted the uniforms very brightly and richly with lots of decorationas I imagine the ancient Persians did when going off to war.
The figures are epoxied to a zinc washer which easily sticks to a magnetic basein case you want to form up units.The weight of the washer is much greater than the plastic figure, sothey always tend to stand up, even on hillsides and rough terrain.The base is flocked with a bit of white glue and static grass.The entire figure is then sealed with Krylon Matte varnish.I chose dry looking grass for the bases to help sort these figures and keep themseparate from the Greeks who have green grass.
These photos are taken on an "endless horizon" sheet of white textured plastic.I did attempt custom white balance, but I guess the room lighting is warm, soI ended up correcting the white again in post-production.Similarly, the auto exposure was fooled by so much white,regardless of whether I spot metered or other meter mode,the figures were under-exposed.So I ended up pushing the auto exposure by 1 stop.The photos were cropped down to a 2:1 aspect ratio.And the contrast range was expanded to the full range.I used Bibble to do the photo editing.Version 4.x has a clunky user-interface, but once you figure it out, it iseasy to batch edit the photos and queue them up for multiple size outputs.Great for working with big batches of pictures.In fact of you do 4 operations on your photos (e.g. white balance, contrast enhance,crop, resize), it is not much different human workload to handle one photo or 50 photos.I can't wait until they come out with their version 5.
Well, that is all for now.The Achaemenid Persian Army box is now done, and it is time tohave a battle with the Greeks.I am evaluating some old school easy rules to have the battle.Will it be Darius and the Persians at the Battle of Issus?Or perhaps the Battle of Plataea.Thanks for reading about my miniatures. More links are at the bottom of the page.