Numidian Horsemen

Four more bases of Newline Designs 20mm Numidian light horsemen finished. Fairly simple miniatures to paint owing to the lack of armour and horse tack. I am fairly pleased with the horses which is something I have tried to improve on, although it was a bit of a fluke. I have generally started to paint cavalry by undercoating with gesso and this time the base layers were painted on quite thinly and washed with the usual Delvan mud. I didn't feel the need to highlight afterwards, I am not sure if this was due to the white gesso undercoat or that the wash was a fairly fresh pot that has been shading more subtlety than the previous pots that had been open for a while. I did however highlight the white fur on the horses and the Numidian riders' faces. The shields I just painted separate, dark brown followed by mottling on a lighter brown.

It was fairly bright for once when I took the pictures. I again used my smartphone but was struggling to get good pics despite the bright conditions. I then found a setting "HDR" which sounded useful which helped to get better snaps along with the phone's picture editor produced the pictures shown in this post, I think I went a bit overboard with the colour settings. I have since learned that the HDR function takes a few pictures with different light settings and combines them to show more detail, ideal for taking pictures of miniatures. It will do for this blog anyway!

I had previously been using bases to represent the attack limit of the unit but I think it will look better going for "correct" ratio of men and beasts. Although cavalry units are half the size of infantry in terms of personnel in Lost Battles cavalry attacks take up the same space as 2 infantry units attacking, I think this is because the cavalry formations need more room to operate.

   

Because I am trying to roughly represent the games troop ratios I plan to have 16 figures for average infantry, so 8 for veteran and 32 for levy units. For average cavalry I should use 8 for average, 4 veteran and 16 levy, but being based on three to a base I'll round down to 6 figures for ease although I would have liked nine I don't think I have the right amount of miniatures just yet. So for Average Numidians two on each base I will use 3 bases. Along with my previous Numidian Cavalry this takes the total finished bases up to nine, which should be enough for Trebia, but I will need to finish about six more bases for Zama.  The game is pretty abstract so its just a case of personal preference in the end.

1/72 20mm Ancients