Thoughts on Painting the Forces of Ibn ‘Iyad and Yahya ben Ghaniya

The Battle of Fraga 1134 was quite the clash of arms involving three of the bog players in Spain at that time, the Christian King Alfonso I of Aragon (the Battler) and the Islamic armies of Ibn 'Iyad and Yahya ben Ghaniya (I suspect that his name might be Yahya *ibn* Ghaniya but I have no Arabic so this is pure speculation going on what little I do know).

I'm going to be focusing on the Islamic forces to tart off with as I have had some experience painting these forces, both up to Collectors Standard and to Wargames Standard. I'm going to go for a good Wargames Standard as I have a ***lot*** or mini's to paint and about five months to paint all the  miniatures, both Christian and Islamic as well as producing the terrain boards!! Yep, that's a lot of work! As an aside, for those who follow my Gewalthaufen Blog I will also be putting together units for The Battle of Marignano. Marignano has not been forgotten!

Back on track; a few years back I found that I has some spare Artizan Moors, certainly bought on a whim, combined with some spare painting time so I gave them a very quick wargames standard paint job. This was facilitated by the large areas of cloth on the mini's which was painted black, dry brushed with a few layers of gradually lightened greys then given a thick wash of Nuln Oil. The rest of the clothing on the mini's such a sleeves and pants were painted in quickly using various browns light and the turbans and cloaks were painted with Wargames Foundry Deep Blue triad. Given that they were painted very quickly they came out rather well. 

I'm going to be using a similar palette to below but being focusing on neatness a little more. I managed to dig these pics out of my old Photoshop account: