Scythians - The Noble Cavalry

Scythian Xyston Noble Cavalry

Back on the 12th April I blogged about the EBay purchase of a large number of Horse Archers.This allowed me to field a 400 AP DBM army using my Early Armenian Irr Cv S as substitutes.

The DBMM list allows you to convert twelve Horse Archers into Noble Cavalry and the Xyston range includes two different types of cavalry ANC20239 Scythian Cavalry on unarmoured horses and ANC20240 Scythian Bodyguard Cavalry on armoured horses. Because the DBMM army list allows you to take them as either option, Irr Cv O or Irr Cv S I purchased the Bodyguard Cavalry castings to model the Nobles as armoured cavalry.

Once I had sorted out the varied horse castings and riders into identical groups to allow me to decide on the figure mix I wanted to use. There were four leftover riders and horses but I was putting these aside to be used as escorts for the command elements I have yet to paint. There will be three Irr Cv S and two Irr LH O generals elements to do. More on that in my next blog entry on the Scythians.

Like all Xyston castings they required a lot of preparation. the riders, shields, lances and mounts require assembly. I had to clean up the shields of their casting tabs and cut the lances to the correct length.The riders were very clean but the horses had very fine casting flow string that had to removed from a few places. The hands needed drilling out with a 0.7mm bit in a Pin Vice before I could glue in their lances. In the end despite there only being 36 figures to assemble it took me over four days to get them ready for painting as I made sure the professional superglue I used had set and dried properly. I decided that I would not glue the riders to the horses so I could paint them more quickly and not worry about getting unwanted paint on the riders. Likewise I then painted the riders before I glued them onto their mounts. In all due to the very details nature of the sculpts and the varied colours I wanted to use it took me 14 days in all just to paint all of the castings prior to assembly. Then of course there's the issue of retouching damage that always happens to unprotected paint on figures.

Once I had assembled them I texture based around the horses legs before hot gluing them to their MDF bases as experience has show me that its a lot easier to do it in two stages than fight to use the texture basing inside very tiny gaps. Once the texture basing was dry yesterday I painted the edges Raw Umber and added the tufts to the bases so they match the rest of the army. I use tufts supplied by Micks Bits from EBay. He does a huge range of tufts of different lengths and colours. I settled on seven different types of tufts for this army as well as Realistic Gravel [Brown] from thepotterhouse7 also on EBay. 

I am very pleased with how they turned out despite the three weeks spent on them from start to finish.

Below are a series of pictures of the finished Noble Cavalry.

howing the finished cavalry.