Photos of Newline Designs 28mm Assyrian Infantry, for L'Art de la Guerre

The Infantry

With a 15mm Museum Miniatures Assyrian army already painted a couple of years ago, my gradual expansion of my 28mm armies into eras other than the Medieval and Dark Ages suddenly found itself with an amusing possibility - collecting a 28mm Assyrian army and painting it exactly the same as their 15mm cousins!

As well as this being inherently an interesting idea, it also meant I could repeat again the 'wallpaper' idea I'd come up with to make these slab-sided Assyrian chariots look much better and more interesting than my own limited painting skills could achieve

I could re-use the 3 Assyrian 28mm Generals that I had painted for the 15mm army too. A huge saving!

The big challenge was still however financial - my Generals were Foundry models, absolutely fantastic but a smidge expensive (OK, eye-wateringly so) to expand to a whole army. In particular the Foundry Chariots weighted in at a staggering ₤28 each, and with Infantry at ₤1.50 a go, and Cavalry at ₤3 the total for an army (with options) was rather intimidating.

The solutions was one I almost literally stumbled upon at the Attack! show in Devizes in Summer 2019 - Newline Designs, who I had mentally pegged as just being a 20mm manufacturer had a show offer on a 28mm Assyrian army, a range of figures I had no idea existed.

Checking them out they turned out to be really nice figures, and with the at-show discount an army worked out at a lot less than half the price of the same figures from Foundry as well. So, I bought them there and then, and of course subsequently bought a shedload more by mail order to give me more options in the army, and less than a year later here they are!

Newline's range has only 5 packs of figures, but with some judicious use of spare swords and mixing up the shields you can get a significant amount of variety out of the 13 different infantry poses if you try!

All of these archers are armoured - three poses, all nicely animated.

Using the same colur scheme as my 15mm army gives the green-clad close formation infantry with blue tower shields "Elite" status

The basing is the usual sand and wood stain with a drybrush of pale grey and Bleached Bone to finish off.

The slingers are also armoured, and also have 3 designs. Their armour means you can fairly easily modify them (or even just hide their slings behind a spare shield) to put them in foot units as rear rank infantry where no-one can see the sling anyway

Every figure has a trim to their clothing - the dark blue regular infantry have a green trim to match the green main clothing color of the Elite forces - this gives extra consistency to the look and feel of the army.

I bought a decent number of the Command packs, with the club-wielder, standard bearer and trumpeter, all of which appear on these "Elite" Medium Swordsmen bases. It's a trumpet, not a telescope you can see in the rear rank!

A few snuck into the regular infantry with russet red shields. I avoided adding designs to them as I'm not sure if it would have worked as well as the simplicity of a plain shield. This one is Army Painter Chaotic Red with a matt black undercoat

By varying the angles they are holding the (separately cast) shields even more animation creeps into the line - even though the number of poses is limited.

You'll see here a rather odd looking sword on the figure in the centre - this is a spare scabbard from a pack of plastic Perry models I think, pressed into service as a sword in this army. It's a bit weird, but hey, the Assyrians may have had some weird stuff to kill people in spectacular and painful ways - and I was in too much of a hurry to get them done to dig out a sword from some on-sprue boxes packed in the cupboard!

I didn't opt to use the spears supplied with the figures as they were a tad too short and too stubby for my liking - however I now suspect these wire ones are in fact too slim and long.. Oh well, at least it made drilling the hands out an easier task!

The sword on the guy at the front is more sensible - but again is a Perry or Gripping Beast plastic cast-off

I picked up these figures also from Newline much later, to use as Egyptian Javelinmen and light infantry. They are the Egyptian Chariot runner model, and are really clean little figures at 1/3 less than Foundry.

Be aware though that their nipples stand out rather too prominently once you add a coat of Army Painter Mid Tone...

I probably should have spent more time on shields with these, but the rest of the army is in block colours so keeping it simple means at least they can also be consistent.

From the back you can clearly see the really nice detail on the armour. I went full-on uniform here, with even identical quivers for the arrows

All of the troops in the army have the same red and white striped hems to their skirts, with these Elite having light blue trim as well to counterbalance the green trim on the dark blue-clad regular infantry

The Egyptian Javelinmen are a super-simple paint job, but still use the same palette of colours

The transition between legs, boots and trousers is a bit of a dogs breakfast in this paint scheme - it was something I struggled to get my head around on the castings to be honest, so some have bare legs and some have leggings. A layer of wash sort of makes the mess I made of it go away a bit (I hope)

One of the disadvantages / advantages of doing these photos is that you spot a few figures where you didn't quite manage to go back and tidy up the demarcation between black hair and drybrushed armour!

Likewise there is always one quiver that you fail to finish properly!

And one set of leggings you miss as well!

The Egyptians have the supplied-by-Newline spears as they worked better for Javelins than spears, and I also wanted to try a sort of bamboo-like effect by painting bands of dark brown with light brown bands within them along the length of the spear. I'm quite happy with how it came out, even though I doubt there was much actual bamboo around ...

Yeah, and you always miss one or two faces too... more tidying up !

Here's another view of the weird sword!

The more you see of it the less odd it looks - honest..

Maybe its not a telescope or a trumpet - it could be a huge drinking horn instead?

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