Goths - Front Ranks

 

At the risk of stretching myself a bit thin on the painting front, between Steppe nomads and Italian Wars Spanish, I pressed ahead with basing the first two ranks of Goths. There will be a further two ranks (three bases) of lesser armoured miniatures to back them up and another six units of foot as well as many of cavalry, not to mention several units of bowmen! At the moment I'm still waiting for the gloss to settle on the final six miniatures before matting down so I'm guessing the unit will be complete in roughly a week. 

I have used LBMS Transfers from the Footsore Miniatures Goths range for the nobility fighting to the front. For the back ranks, or the missing bases, I have just painted the shields in a relatively bland manner to indicate the lesser status of the warriors. Pics of the whole unit soon-ish.

Over all the Footsore Miniatures Goths are great miniatures sculpted by the much loved work of Bill Thornhill. If I had any gripes is would be that some of the castings came with extra metal lumps where small sections of the mould had torn; which is very annoying, not to mention sometimes dangerous to remove. It can require some fairly forceful cutting and being the sort of chap who values his digits I used Kevlar gloves when doing this rather risky work. Not a bad investment after nearly severing the  nerve in my thumb and losing the use of said thumb about five years back!

I found some interesting reenactment pictures for reference in Simon McDowall's Conquerors of the Roman Empire: The Goths very useful along with the new book from the Society of Ancients publication, The Goths, From Berig to the Battle of Adrianople very useful for source material, though the latter is a little earlier than the period I have in mind for fighting my Early Byzantines.