If you recall my goals for 2025 was to complete painting my Anglo-saxon army. I picked it up from Victrix miniatures using Late Anglo-Danes and Early Saxon kits. I went ahead and assembled and painted the first few units, a Noble unit and 3 Fryd units. That will be the core of the army. However, an Anglo-saxon army is more than just a shieldwall! 
Now, it is time to build and paint the remaining units for the army. That is two units of Skirmishers and one unit of archers or slingers. However, I am making 20 archers and 10 slingers because I can. The great thing about the Victrix Dark Age Archers is that they will work fine in my Anglo-saxon, Viking, and other Dark Age armies for Fury of the Northman. For the Skirmishers, I am using a mix of the Late and Early Saxon set that I had left-over from the shield wall. The Early Saxons had better parts for Skirmishers, but most of the bodies were tunic wearers from the Late Anglo-Danes kit. It took me a bit to assemble them all, but here we go..... plus two Monks just because.
Thankfully, we had a moment of clear weather and that solved my issue. I was able to get outside and get these bad boys Grey Seer undercoated. Crisis averted! However, I lost a few weeks waiting for that to happen.
With the priming done, it was time to just lean into it and get batch painting! By now, I have a very familiar process for this. I did not plan on deviating from it this time, because it works really well for me. Only 50 or so models to do in this batch but none of them have shields! That will make this batch much quicker!
I generally get a decent amount of time to paint on the weekends as my wife is a full-time student and employee. Therefore, at least 1 day on the weekend she is doing homework all day. That means, the house is fairly quiet and I need to entertain myself for a while.
That means I had a Saturday to work on these Anglo-saxons. I was able to give everyone some flesh using Barbarian Flesh from the Armypainter line. Then, I set about batch painting. I always start with shoes, and I typically use two or three different colors for it. This time I uses Oak Brown, Leather Brown, and Fur Brown for the footwear. Typically, every third man and then fill in any gaps at the end.
Then, I did their leggings. Not all of the models had leggings. My perception was that it was a distinct minority. However, I still used three different colors on the Leggings. Armypainter Skeleton Bone, Desert Yellow, and Mummy Robes.
Next was the trousers. Here I used about five different colors with each unit of 10 only using it once or twice. Therefore, the force would have similar colors but each unit was relatively unique in their attire. For the trouser I used a variety of colors from Scaly Hide, Army Green, Deep Blue, Daemonic Yellow, Uniform Grey. Leather Brown, all the way to Pure Red.
Most of these models are just wearing a single piece tunic that covers the arms and goes down to the knees. However, there are a few that were wearing an underlayer. The models wearing leather armor had it over their tunics as well. Therefore, I used the same colors I had used on the Leggings to paint the under garments as well. I made sure to avoid matching the same colors of leggings, trousers, and under garments. No one duplicated colors. Everyone was pretty much had their bottom halves painted, but after the first Saturday they still looked like they had a long way to go!
Then, a disaster struck. I was stricken with Influenza A! It hit me pretty hard, and I was out of commission for two weekends. That really messed up my timing! Once my Influenza A cleared up I got back to work, but the spark was still not really there. Time to grind.
I used the same colors I had used on the trousers and undergarments for the tunics. Honestly, this is the bulk of the models surface area. I think getting the tunics done means that these models are about halfway. All that is left is belts, weapons, hair, and hats. Mostly small things, but things none the less.
After a month of working on these guys, I am a bit behind on the progress I wanted. I expected to be this far after two weeks, not four. However, now that I am healthy I just need to finish them off and grind the last bits out.
I think I am going to call it an update for this week. Until next time!
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