Romano-British for Dux Britanniarum

“…a fire heaped up by the impious easterners spread from sea to sea. It devastated town and country round about, and, once it was alight, it did not die down until it had burned almost the whole of the island and was licking the western ocean with its red and savage tongue…”

Gildas, De Excidio

With a suitable introduction from Gildas, here are my first two groups of Saxon warriors. I was a bit hesitant in starting these, spending too much time agonising over colour choices and how I would ensure that they didn’t look too uniform. In the end, the solution came when I decided that it was more important to get started.

As most of each figure is covered in mail, I did that first, drybrushing with VMC Gunmetal Grey followed by a drybrush of VMC Silver.  Once that was done, I did the faces.

Next came the tunics and it was here that I decided to stop worrying about colour combinations and mixes and see it more as an opportunity to try something new. So I resorted to the very simple expedient of grabbing any colour I hadn’t used before and putting it down as the base coat. I then mixed it with varying amounts of either White or Iraqi Sand to fade and mute the colour in the first and second highlight.

It helped that I had recently read in a book on the Vikings that their clothes were very brightly coloured and not the dull browns and blacks of popular depiction. I took that as carte blanche to choose whatever colour I pleased and go with it for these Saxons who would have come from a similar culture. The LBMS shield transfers were also brightly coloured which helped validate my decision. In the end it was very liberating and I was able to bash these out relatively quickly. I think I’ll take a similar approach with anything prior to the late Seventeenth Century in future.