Greek Hoplites

Occasionally I will purchase unpainted miniatures on eBay, paint them, and "Flip them" by selling them on eBay. I picked up some Greek Hoplites from Wargames Foundry on eBay that I'm going to paint and sell.

I had some experience painting Ancient Greeks as I did an army with 15mm Essex hoplites in the early 1990's for the rules De Bellis Antiquitatis or DBA for short. Greek armor for the most part is leather that is usually white which for me, can be very boring to paint. The key to a good looking Greek force is, in my opinion, the shields. The shields (hoplon in Greek - that's where term hoplites comes from) are what the eye is going to focus on.


Usually when I paint I like to get a "production" line going: paint all of the blues, now paint all of the pants white, etc. With these generic Greeks it will be different. Since the shields and spears are separate from the figures, I am going to paint all of the shields first and then the figures. The shields will be all individually different, which adds to the visual appeal of Greek infantry in line. I did 4 figures as a test.


There are about a gazillion references for Greek shields on the internet, not to mention the local library and the good ole' Osprey books. I am pleased with the results of the test figures; shields were fun to paint and the figures were boring to paint. In addition, I might change the basing to a square and mount them in two ranks - I'll have to give that some thought.


For anyone doing the Wargames Foundry Greek hoplites, glue the shield on before you glue the spear - trust me on this! As always, you can click on the images above for a bigger picture.