Saracen light infantry

I have always been fascinated by the crusades somehow, the whole heavy knight thing, the light horse archers and the hot desert sun. All the famous places the mystics of the Middle East.

And now I have taken the plunge to start to collect it in 28mm.

The plan was to try to reuse one or two of my African tribal unit as a sort of mercenary light skirmishing unit for an Egyptian fraction. And the Medieval Swedes I painted previously is planned to be recycled into a western force.

Its great to be able to use one miniature for lots of different settings.

But my first new and dedicated unit for this project is this small unit of Saracen light infantry. Ive used leftover parts from the Perrys plastic box Mahdist Ansar. The miniatures with most clothing or Arabic headgear and so on that I didn´t think matched what I was after in the Tribal Africa project.

 

I used my fingertips to bend the swords and that worked really good as a way of giving the troops curved blades instead, Im not sure about how accurate that actually is but I think it looks good.
I used a knife and greenstuff to the shields to give them a better Targe looking shield instead and painted the miniatures.

The banner is from the plastic box.

I will start this with single bases miniatures to be able to use them in skirmish game but intend to use multibases later on when I have gathered a bigger collection for larger types of games.

 

 I think they maybe look a little more like Barbary corsairs then Saracen infantry but I think its close enough and its hard to argue with the price of plastics especially considering I got these from the leftovers.

A nice little unit for trying out the brush and colors for this new project.