A surge towards victory?

As British athletes piled up an impressive horde of gold medals this Olympic weekend, I was pushing forward with my attempt to complete 26 figures in 26 days.

First up is this mounted knight.  He's combined from a couple of unidentified castings I found in my random box of spare figures.

Very broadly inspired by the Osprey book on the Baltic Crusades, I've gone for a vaguely Swedish colour scheme.  No basing yet as I'm not sure what this figure's ultimate role might be.

Next to be completed was this Numidian cavalryman.

The rider is one of a handful I picked up cheap on eBay.  The horse is left over from a pack of Foundry Plains Indians.  Again, not based yet apart from his bottle-top painting stand.  He may join a few of his fellows on a 120mm wide Impetus element base.

And finally for now, a unit of Late Roman skirmishers.

These are slightly modified from the Gripping Beast plastics set.  I wanted a bit of variation from the other archers I've painted so I chose a different base colour (Vallejo Khaki and white mixed) and I replaced the round patch decorations with square swastikas.  On some of the figures simply filled in the etched circular patch with Green Stuff, on other I attached a square panel of very thin Green Stuff to represent an appliqué cloth panel.

I've added a bit of variation to the unit by importing some non-standard heads.  I wanted the unit to look like a cosmopolitan bunch from across the Western Empire so I've used a couple of heads from GB's Dark Ages plastics and one metal Numidian head left over from the figure I converted into a mounted Bacaudae shepherd.

So sixteen down and ten left to do with another seventeen days left in August.  I'm in gold medal position on this one!