Allied Principes

 I had to check my  post about planes for the year to see if I actually mentioned I wanted to do Ancients, and yes I  did!

I  painted some 250-300 ancients before I moved, they did survive the move, but through the last 2-3 years moving the boxes as I was looking for other boxes etc. They got weaker, and the box finally   gave out, taking out over 50% of them. I  lost all my romans except some velites and one triarii unit.
I also lost my Tarentine cavalry, my thuroperos.

The survivors are  Geroge the Elephant, my two units of phalangites, the aforementioned roman units and a unit of Carthaginian veterans. So I'm trying to save them by stripping them and repainting them. I'm now working on one such unit some roman cav.
But I also got some spare unpainted stuff laying around. And I managed to get aa unit of allied principes done. No shield decals sadly. So instead I went with the M&M approach. Also, they seem to have the same mix of colors as the new colour coded Daleks.

Quite a lot of work on these, I think they take 50-100%  longer than my GNW figures, lots of little details.

I've also given up on the "few big bases" approach for my ancients and instead gone with  my now standard base side of 60x60mm

Long time no see(again)

Remember when I used to post 3 posts a week?
Good think I don't have any ads on this blog or my income would serously have dropped! :)

Anyway I'll make it up to you at the end of the blog.



I've spent the last month painting some Roman Hastati, The first week was spent finding the damn box, I had put it away after December and couldn't find it.



Again 20 figure unit.

 I'm quite happy with it, my white gone fucked up, half ruining those in white tunic

 I just wanted to see how it would look with lots of diffrent tunic colors, There are a bunch: white, 3 diffrent reds, blue, sevral greens, sevral yellows ect.  I'm also very happy with the Bronze, think I've found a nice, bronze, it's Coat d'arms drwarven bronze, mixed with black, then a coat of agrax earthshade ink, then some bronze/copper from coat d'arms that the name has been washed off.


Here is my line of hastati, The new batch got slightly wider bases but more shallow.

I did promise to make up for the lack of posts, Well here you got, PUPPIES!


The boys got names, but we are keeping one of the girls, we just don't know which one yet.


One of the girls, temporary name Stripa.

 One of the Boys, Kenai

 Another boy Noatak

 The second girl, Temporary name Flekken

The 3rd Boy Yukon

Hastati Done

 So my Hastati unit is done. I still have enough figures to do another unit.
But I realised I allready have a finished roman legion, and so I could consentrate on my roman allies. So if I have the money next week, I'll order 3 boxes of victrix roman allies a box of hoplite mercs(for pyrrhus) With 3 boxes I could be able to make a full legion 1 unit of triarii 2 of pricipes and two of hastati. And a shitload of velites. I only actualy need 16 velites pr legion.

So This unit is done, 2 hastati. Quite happy with them. And I want to thank Corso from starship pullo forums for his 3 recipes for yellow! They work great.

 While the hail caesar rules actualy prefer the manipular romans to have sevral small unis. For simplicity I simply devide each "line" in a wing. so each normal sized unit, represent 5 manipelers or 600ish soldiers.

More Romans

 Half done, half done with this unit, today I will start on the second base, with the command figures. The victrix  command figures seems less "epic" in style then say Aventine, that got some very cool command figures, that are super fun to paint,

I have done a few things with the second batch, I feel the faces are much better. Also I knew better how to make the paint more pop out, so on the whole the figures are just more clean and better.  I pulled out the first batch and put them in the second rank So the first rank is now the latest ones.

 I will try and squise 2 units out of each boxs, but I only have 32 shield transfers  and I need 40 figures. With 2-3 command pr unit, that is down to 34 with regular shields, so some of the shields will be all black. But thats good value, for 30 pounds I get 2 units of close order infantry and two units of velties. In metal this would be £70

 But I honestly care more about quality then price, and these are as good as the best metal romans(like aventine)

 I'm very happy with the faces of the new ones, I looked at the faces in like 5000x3000 pixeles, were the nose on the face is almost as big as the whole figure in real life. And still the faces looked good

Victrix roman WIP

 So I started on my Victrix romans, I was quite happy with them,, untill I saw the pictures, 1 their faces looked like crap, and 2 the one of the far left got a dot of metal in his tunic! that last one is easy to fix tho. When I did them, I was more concerned with the shields, but they looked better then I'd thought in daylight. The flesh in general was has to many extremes. The blending of the highlights is not good enough. The theme is light blue, all units in the legion will have light blue feathers and light blue scabard.

 The red was easy to work with, easy to make look good, the "natural linen" not so much.

10mm Ancients

 So I got  a bunch of 10mm Ancients, Doing the 2nd Punic wars. all figures are the new punic war range from Pendraken. So far only 1 unit is done, and thats the 48 hastati, each finished unit is gonna be 4 bases, and 48 figures for 3 rank infantry, and 56 for the warbands, Cav is gonna be 24 for standard size and 12 for small. The rules will be Hail Caesar.







Half a unit of Pricipes

 Iberian mercenry warband

 Carthagenian vertrans

 Big grey thingies, also known as elephants(the bible called them Behemoth(no it did not talk about dionsaurs)

 Numidian cav, 15 of them, plan on having 24 figure units for standard sized units. So it's gonna be lots of cav goodness.

 Everythnig from an angle, I have notised one thing about ancients, even with 28mm, the figures often just end up beeing heads with shields, it's often very hard to see the armor/cloth/uniform, as the shield take up the front, and you need  a special angle to see the body of the soldier, this is even worse in 10mm, so I  tried to get an angle, so  you can actualy see, some of the badly painted figure and not just the shield.

Both the carthagenians and pricipes have chainmail.
I honestly did all figurs very simple, the horses got 2 shades only, and it was quckly done, not alot of detail, since the units are so big it gets boring fast, like the iberians, took me 3 days for this half unit,, they got a base coat on the unit with a highlight, and purple line on the end(read they had that)  the chainmail is a single coat of gunmetal, no inks or highlights, as I said you mostly only see the shield anyway. so these are by no means my best figures, not even my best 10mm, the only ones that look ok, are the elephants.

Lots of ancient pictures

 So I have done some more paining, I've finished my hastati unit. done the first base of my pricipes, and first base of my celtic vetrans.

 So my Allied Pricipes, a blue yellow theme, tho there isn't that much yellow, as they are prety coverd in armor, so more like bronze blue theme. Their armor is pretty complex, most of them have a mix of steel chian mail and broze armor, with leather armor under that again. Heavy stuff.

 My celts/gauls, I can not get my head around those shield transfers, they woul not stick, even when I let them dry over night. Some fell of other half on, had to use wood glue and super glue to fix some of them on, and it just looks bad.  I suck at arts and crafts.

 Theise are armored with chain mail. To be usesed as celtic allies for my Hannibal army.

 And my finished Hastai unit, need another one of these.

 The command figures.

Fruit of my labors the last few weeks.