Experimental Clibinari

I decided to indulge myself and start in on some Clibinari. These are from the  Garrison 25mm Achaemenid list. What I really wanted were some Sassinid figures, but I had a unit of these in my Valdurian army many years ago. Like my Sassinid elephants, they went missing when I graduated from college and headed west. To be honest, I expected to have followed up with Sassinids by now but maybe this fall. In any event, it felt like time to paint some up. This is where I hit a small hitch, I had no idea how the figure should look. 

This figure, with its baggy pants, cowl, short sleeved over tunic and gallic style hauberk, doesn't resemble any illustrations of Achaemenids that I have seen, thought the short sleeves are typical of Garrison Persians.  I thought I saw something similar in the 2,500 th anniversary parade but on reviewing the video footage I couldn't find them again so perhaps I imagined it.  That was one problem, the other was that I hadn't decided yet who they will represent, Rebels, Persian Nobles, subjects from which province?  It seemed smart to stop and figure that out and work on a test figure.

After trying a dab a colour or 2 to see how it looked, and doing some thinking, I decided that these would be Nobles answering the call to arms, not a regular guard unit. My first thought was to make them Rebels along with my Garrison light cavalry, my "Hyrkanians", but the more I looked at what figures I had available, painted and unpainted,  and thought about scenarios, I decided to put the Garrison Persians on one side, that made these loyal Nobles. One question answered.  

Leather seemed like a reasonable fabric to make a protective hood out of but in addition to not being able to find .any Persian or similar examples, the hood has wrinkles like cloth not leather thick enough to protect. fabric. If you ignore the helmet, the head piece actually resemble one versions of the usual Persian headgear. Since this is often shown as white, I tried painting this one white. That seemed a bit too stark a contrast so I fell back on a dark yellow.

The short sleeved over tunic could probably be almost any colour, my Immortals and light cavalry wear uniform versions but then you can see the whole thing, here only the sleeves show. More than that, I decided that these would be Nobles rather than guardsmen and uniform doesn't sit well with Nobles. A compromise was in order, I went with a dark red that might have been a leather under tunic or might be a tabard of sorts.

Baggy pants and tunics were next. Since they were now nobles answering the call, colourful and non-uniform seemed in order. If the pants had been tight, I'd have thought about embroidery but stiff embroidery doesn't seem to match billowing fabric and I didn't want to go for the cotton print look either so solid colours with embroidery on the tunic, mostly a little brighter colours than this fellow with his dark blue pants perhaps.

Although the armour might be  bronze scale, I have opted for iron since that says "cataphract" to me, but I added polished bronze bits to brighten them. The shields might have been wood or leather or born personal devices but without a reference point, these being nobles in the King's service, and me being lazy, I settled on plain purple shields with a bronze boss.

Now, 11 more to go as the opposing Royal and Rebel armies take shape in my mind.