Late Roman Horse Archers - Equites Secundo Sagittarii

This is the last full unit to use up my old 1980s figures and the last cavalry unit for this army. 

The basic figure for the riders is an Asgard (later Table Top Games and now Alternative Armies' Isarus range) LRC1 Late Roman Horse Archer. As usual with figures of that vintage, there was only one variant so, to get more variety, I did a couple of head swaps from spare helmeted figures and made typical late Roman round hats for three more from Milliput. I'm not sure why they are all holding their bows in their right hands - unless they really are all left handed it seems an awkward way of doing things.

I modified the cloaks too - in some cases I just filed bits off but for others I made new folds from Milliput. It all adds to the variety and I think if the cloaks and heads are varied it looks less strange that there is only one pose.

One of the 8 had been damaged so I cut him off at the waist and replaced the top half with that from a G7 Goth Archer Advancing. It would have been good to have one or two more changed like this to a completely different pose but was such a fiddly job that I left it at just the one. I think the grey blob on the horses tail must be from a bit of plasticine that I used to hold the figure whilst the epoxy dried. It disappeared in the pre-painting detergent wash anyhow.

The other modification I made was the shields. The basic figure has a very small round shield with a textured sort of surface, a bit like those 1970s pub tables with a hammered copper top. I wanted to paint the shields with one of the designs attributed to Equites Sagittari in the Notitia Dignitatum so needed something a bit bigger with a boss. After early attempts at cutting or punching circles of plasticard, I requisitioned some small sequins from my wife's sewing supplies and used those. I roughed the surface up with sandpaper and made the shield bosses from Milliput. The sequins are thin (about 0.2 mm) but I guess that is actually more realistic than cast shields that scale to about 4" thick!

As with my other Late Roman mounted  units, the horses are a mix of Minifigs and Asgard and I accepted the odd mix of walking and galloping poses in the interest of variety. By this stage, I was really scraping the barrel for usable figures so had to make new tails for a couple of horses where the original cast tail snapped off in the the process of removing old, badly applied paint.

The white of the painted shield design is my standard off-white Vallejo sequence of Khaki Grey, Iraqi Sand and Ivory. I really like the warm effect this gives but in this case I think it was a mistake as being too close (or identical) to the white of most of the tunics and not enough of a contrast to the yellow of the shield rims. A grey or grey-blue sequence might have been a better choice.

The one thing I really wasn't happy about with this unit was the horse colours. I've been trying to get a bit more variety and some of these just haven't worked out well. I'll need to have a proper re-think of this before I tackle any more cavalry units but, as this is the last one for this army then Normandy 1944 is next in the queue, there is no urgency.