"28mm Greek Successor painting guides..." Topic

Who makes painting guides for Greek Successor armies besides Montvert? I can't afford the prices they want on Amazon for their OOP painting guides. Will Osprey ever come out with one? Or am I out of luck?

Thanks,
Regards,
Blake Wood Walker

Hi Blake. Don't mean to sound facetious but what exactly are you looking for?

For the most part the written historical sources for this period are silent regarding the colours of units. Much of what we know regarding appearance come from art especially pottery which, generally speaking, is concerned with depicting a particular subject matter, perhaps a well known historical figure or something from the realm of myth. In a nutshell, there are no uniform guides for this period.

Having said that, one can likely conclude that units in professional armies such as the Macedonians would have more uniformity than those raised from citizen levies. There is also some evidence that units of the Royal Persian Army may have worn uniform colours.

In my armies for the Diadochi, each phalangite unit has a particular tunic colour and shield design. Tunic colours are varied in mercenary and citizen units with the latter sometimes sharing a common shield design.

You can't really go wrong when painting armies for this period. Just keep in mind that many modern colours would have been unavailable and that the price of purple would have put it beyond the reach of most. Colours would be rather subdued and would be limited to those found in nature; red, brown, green, black, blue, yellow etc.

There are literally hundreds of pictures of Hellanistic wargames armies available on the web. Try a google search and you will find lots of inspiration.

What guide do you need? They wore linen in any colour you fancy and armour.

You may wish to check out Jeff Jonas's website:

link

While the shields of various units may have had the same design, I think the odds of units all having the same uniform would have been pretty low. There was no supply system to speak of and arms, armor, et., were purchased from all over the place. A stated above, the color palette would have been pretty basic, but you can pretty much paint them however you feel. The only real information we have is from the parade at Daphne and even that is incomplete.

Osprey have a title "Macedonian Armies after Alexander 323-168" also quite a few Ancient Warfare magazines cover the era and are available as pdf also.

However I have seen that most the art work is around the web after searching google images for Hellenistic warriors.

As mentioned already Jeff Jonas' Ancient Battles website is a great resource and full of inspiring images.

This – link – is not bad at all as a painting inspiration for the Ptolemaic army. The text is in French, but it's full of colour drawings, in the same style as the two visible on the cover, many of them drawing directly on the colours from grave monuments, etc.