Hoplites

The following figures where painted as gifts for my daughter's teachers.

Our family is very blessed to have secured a spot in the local public charter school that also happens to be right in our neighborhood.  The charter school is very academically focused teaching a classic liberal education.  Don't be fooled by "liberal", there is nothing political about it.

Thomas Jefferson said in 1779 "Those persons, whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens; and . . . they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance."

The liberal education is delivered through the teaching of "Core Knowledge" as described by E.D. Hirsch, his book "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know",  and the Core Knowledge Foundation.

Her school has adopted the Hoplite as their mascot so I'm back this year with another batch of Hoplites.  I think I did a much better job on these citizen soldiers than last years batch.  I realize now that I was so rushed to get them done last year I didn't even bother to post them.  One photo made it to the full site and i'll at some time put them in the Miniature Machinations Ancients Gallery along with these new ones.

I think we are only giving three figures to the teachers so we'll have a few to add to our collection.  These are the gifts.

These are the extra figures i'll be adding to my collection.

I've taken artistic liberty on the colors.  Mainly to create a palette that goes with the shield transfers from Little Big Man Studios.  The transfer are cool but I do have one problem with them.  They are really too nice for my painting.  In some ways I think they take away from what I have done.

The photos turn into a showcase of the transfers and no so much the figures.  That's pretty common when people post up figures using them.  Lot's of compliments on the shields with little mention of the figures.  I may go back to the waterslides that came with the figures or try to paint my own next time.

Here are a couple of spares that I had leftover from last year.

 You should be able to see that my painting has improved.  I had more time this year to pick out the details.  I used more highlights and didn't use washes very much this time.  I'm not going back on them as they will display or fight all the same and they look fine together with the others.







I may have to bust out some Reaper pre-painted skeletons I have and make up a quick opponent so we can try a couple skirmishes.

Thanks for looking I hope you liked them.  Please leave a comment and add me to your RSS Feeds.  I'll be back over the next 2 months with a few posts.