Mythic Battles: The Original One Eye

Long before Antigonus the One-Eyed came along the original one-eyed monsters in town where the Cyclopes. Polyphemus was the Cyclops who was blinded and robbed by Ulysses whilst on his way home from Troy. He comes as part of the Poseidon expansion box for Mythic Battles: Pantheon which I bought when it was re-released via Kickstarter. I had played a fair bit with the initial box set and the models had plenty of use in Kings of War as well.

Poseidon Box Artwork

Having worked through all my other outstanding models I started working on these last week whilst I waited on the models for Clash of Spears to be released from lock-down (still no word yet). The two big boxes that I bought where for Poseidon and Hera and as well as adding these Gods to the available roster they also contained a range of Heroes, Monsters, and Troops.

Some of the first I completed where Polyphemus and the Sirens, both from the Poseidon box. For these I wanted to create a water base but didn't have any resin to make a traditional style water base but I did have some Liquitex Gloss Gel which I had bought for another project. This is basically a gloss gel mixing agent that can be applied in thick coats to give a gloss affect, it can have paint mixed in to add colour as well.

I chose not to colour the gel but instead to paint the bases with various shades of blue going from darker to lighter blending whilst the paint was wet. Once this was dry I stippled the gel over the top to try and produce a wave like affect. The gel isn't clear when first applied so it does take a couple of days to get the final look, with the thicker parts taking the longest to clear. Once it had cleared I gave the base a dry brush with white to add a wave-peaks sort of look. Overall I think this worked rather well and avoided the mess of using resin.

In game terms Polyphemus is a proper brawler who likes to get into the thick of the action, he also has a useful ranged attack. The Sirens are Troops so whilst they do die more easily than the Heroes and Monsters they do come with multiple models in the unit and can be recalled by the Gods. The models themselves aren't my favorite sculpt in the game and I wasn't entirely sure what to do with them but they came out OK.

The other big box I got was that for Hera which includes the veteran versions of my two favorite heroes, Achilles and Heracles along with a host of others.

When I painted the original versions of these models I was making heavy use of the Army Painter dip and at the moment I'm trying out a different technique that relies more on using a base and then the GW contrast paints as a wash. This of course means that the models look rather different with the later models being brighter than the older. I'm not planning on going back to repaint all the old models so I think we just have to assume that Veteran Achilles had a bath more often than his younger self.

So to round out this post I have a couple of Troops, one from each box. The brightly colored Stymphalian Birds where bronze beaked birds which fired their feathers to kill their prey, these where killed by Heracles for his Sixth Labour. I did them with a nice bright plumage as befits killer birds!

The other Troop is of Harpies who make up the second flying Troops in the game, these where driven away by Jason when he aided King Phineus of Thrace. The colors are more muted for these models and I went with a humanoid interpretation.

With the addition of two flying Troop choices you could now draft all all flying force, apart from the Divinity.