Thursday, February 18, 2010

Seleucid Shield Patterns

My second Field of Glory army will most likely be a Seleucid army. I'm going to be running a Magnesia game this summer with some friends, and in preparation for that I'm going to be painting up several Selucid battle groups. With these, and a few of the optional battle groups I've already painted I'll be a good way towards a full army, so I might as well finish the job. I'm still waiting for my pike figures to arrive, but while I wait I decided I could start working on making up the graphics for my shield decals. There are several good brands of decals available, but I like making my own when I can. This picture shows several variations of the classic Macedonian star shield decoration that I created myself. I'm thinking I will most likely use the top center red pattern on a white shield background for one of my units, and one of the black patterns on silver shields for my Argyraspides. My friend Mike, who always gives me great advice when it comes to ancients, tells me that "Argyraspides" means "Silver Shields" in Greek. That makes picking shields for my Argyraspides unit a foregone conclusion as far as I'm concerned.

This is another design I'm considering using. I got this image from the Internet and cropped it and cleaned it up. I think if I reduce it to the correct size it might make a decal that gives the shield the look of a real embossed bronze shield. This trick will help compensate for the fact that most 15mm figures come with smooth shields, not the fancy embossed shields that some 28mm figures have.  While I'm waiting for my pike figures to arrive I'll be working on a battle group of Scythed chariots after I finish up the second unit of Thureophoroi that I have on the painting table.

2 comments:

Steve-the-Wargamer said...

A post on how you do that - turn the image into a decal would be very interesting...

AJ (Allan) Wright said...

Will do Steve.