Saturday, December 3, 2011

Roman invasion is afoot

So they are finnaly here, after waiting for what seemed like an eternity.
I orderd the figures on a Thirsday from Aventine miniatures, 12 hours later and they were shipped. Then the damn british and Norwegian postalservice took their sweet time in getting the figures to me, 10 days it took, you would think that the North sea wouldn't be much of a hindrence with you know planes and boats having been invented, we aren't talking about pre historic migration of hunter gatheres, it takes 2 days with a boat, it takes 80 minutes with a plane.

Lets say I get drunk one evening becasue Ninjas killed my family, I think that would give me cause to drink, then after a wet night, I decide I want to get drunk in another country, so I get on a train to the airport, wait mabye 2 hours for a plane to london, and then less then 90 minutes later I'm getting even drunker at the airport bar at heathro.
So less then 4 hours after deciding to go, I'm in the uk, yet my figures take 10 days to get here and they aren't even drunk.

It's not like the package had anything dangures in them, This is a list of what was not in the package.

Plutonium
Coke
Coke the liquid type
Pepsi
Heroin
C4
Semtex
Dynamit
250 AK 47s
Horse radish

As you see since I have none of those things, it should take the customs people that long to prosses my package.

So I finnaly got the package. And now for some unadoltirated ass kissing.

After I bought the Warlord romans I decided I didn't want to do imperial romans, I wanted to fight carthage, so I started looking for propper romans to use, I googgled this and that, found some here and there, but they never looked nice enough, I'm used to 28mm Napoleonics, were you have perries, Calpe, Front Rank ect.

The metal romans I found looked just off, weird poses, not that detailed, or they were the wrong period.

So I googeled and googled, to my suprise I didn't find avantine miniatures through google but google led me to were els, TMP with an old thread talking about avantine.

So I found the site and fell in love with the figres, the right period, wonderfull figures, I hadn't planed on buying lots of metal but hey what are you going to do.

So I orderd 1 unit of Hastati, Princepei, Velites and triarii, thats about 70 figues, or about half a legion they way I'm going to make a legion.

So as I said the order was shipped with in 12 hours of me placeing it.
I sent a few mails to keith about hisotric info, possiblity of unit deals ect. He was very acomidating, answering my silly questings, giving me quite alot of help in everything I asked.
This is just yet another example of what I've notised with wargaming sellers, they are wonderfull people with great service in mind.
I look forward to the next time I order for aventine.

So on to the figures, I loved to paint these, they were quite easy to paint, beeing mostly cloth, I painted them in a medium to dark blue, infact I used the French blue from foundry triads. I liked the resualt, I also gave them white shileds with dual stallions on them, I'm glad the transfers came with a user guide, since they are aplyed quite diffrently from the warlord ones.
The transfers are quite expencive, £3.5 pr. 12 but they are a step up from the warlord ones, these have lots of detail of the 12, sevral are unik, they aren't 12 clones, one got dirt on it, sevral got diffrent cuts ect. Makes the shields seem more real.

But they also take some time to do, with the cutting, and placing of the transfer and the fact you have to paint the shield first, just doing 5 shields takes probebly as much time as painting 2 figures.

So I'm happy with these, I really like how I got the bronze, I used bronze barrel shade, then armor wash, with light bronze barrel to highlight,


I like the blue I like the shields, tho I expect they will look better once I get the hang of the transfers. I used dark leather with highlights.


The scabard is a little sinple, I've seen people do the scabard very elaborte with lots of color, I deicded to keep my Hastati simple, and do more elaborate stuff for the Prencipei and Triarii.




As I said, I like how the bronze looks.






3 comments:

Bluewillow said...

sweet job on those!

cheers
Matt

Paul´s Bods said...

Horseraddish!!!?
Great paint job.
Cheers
paul

Gunfreak said...

Thanks for the encuraging comments.