Workbench Update: Planning the Norse-Irish for Impetus

I thoroughly enjoyed painting (and still enjoy playing with) my medieval Free Company army for Impetus.  As a later medieval project, there were endless colour options to try out and the beautiful Corvus Belli models were a real joy to paint.  When it was time to start planning a second 15mm Impetus army, I decided that I wanted to do something that was a little less conventional and that would play differently than my combined longbow/cavalry force.

A respectable pile of 15mm Irish javelinmen from Feudal Castings and Corvus Belli.
These will be used to populate bases of Irish Nobles, Bonnachts, and Kerns.

After discussing numerous options, Chris and I settled on the Dark Age period, and with the recent release of Extra Impetus #2, he chose "Normans in Normandy 900-1072" and I went with "Norse Irish 840-1100."  From a player's perspective, I chose the Norse-Irish because of the high concentration of javelin-armed light foot and skirmishers.  Such a mobile (yet fragile) force will offer a completely different play style than my medieval army.  Furthermore, the inclusion of Norse allies would allow me to paint some Viking infantry, but not so much to get me bogged down, and would provide a nice solid shield wall to present to the enemy.  The first 300-point chunk shown below will help guide my painting.

NORSE IRISH (300 points)

#	Unit	Type	Pts
-	Poor CS, Fair General x 2, Poor General x 1	CMD	50
2	Nobles (with mounts)	FL	40
4	Bonnachts	FL	76
3	Kerns	S	36
2	Irish Bowmen	S	24
2	Huscarls (veteran)	FP	42
2	Huscarls (rear ranks)	FP	22
1	Viking Bowmen	S	7
			297

I've painted up one test unit of Bonnachts already (shown here) and I plan on prepping up some more models for painting in the very near future.  This project will be interspersed with various 28mm odds & ends (a little Gothic Horror, some Alkemy stuff, a few Cygnar models), but I hope to start producing on a regularly within the coming few weeks.

Thanks for reading,
JET