75 mm Imperial Roman legionary, part 1

Now that the backlog is out of the way, I can post about my ongoing projects. A few weeks back I ordered two pewter 75mm miniatures on Etsy from a seller who shall remain unnamed: a Roman legionary and a Greek hoplite. When they arrived, they were packaged very well, so no complaints there. The detail is also absolutely amazing. However, when googling for inspiration on how to paint the figures, I came across a model from a different manufacturer that looked a little too similar for my liking. After some more googling, I found that I had unwittingly bought two unauthorised recasts...

I’m feeling pretty bad about it. The miniature/wargaming market isn’t a particularly large one and the artists designing and sculpting these incredible figures can use all the support they can get. In future, I’ll definitely make sure to only buy directly from the original manufacturer. In the meantime though, I have these two figures lying around and it seems a waste to just throw them out.

Both figures came as multi-part kits that need some assembly. Some clipping and filing is also required to make the parts fit properly.

All components of the Roman legionary with sprues and flash still in place

This is as far as I will assemble the model before painting, because some details will be very difficult to reach once the arms are attached.

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More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint: I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again. Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario. Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...

Roman watchtower

After wrapping up my wee Roman army with my Roman cavalry unit last month I needed a bit of a change of pace. Designing and scratch building a Roman watchtower to go with my army seemed just the thing. Most models of Roman watchtowers you find online are based on stone examples like those found along Hadrian’s Wall or in southern Germany. I, however, wanted to build a tower more like those found along the Dutch part of the limes , the border of the Roman Empire. As stone is pretty hard to come by in this tiny flat country of ours, watchtowers were either made entirely out of timber or had a timber frame with inset wattle and daub sections. I particularly liked the look of the reconstructed watchtower at Vleuten-De Meern, with its dark timber frame and yellow wattle and daub. As you can see, my tower is quite heavily influenced by the Vleuten-De Meern watchtower, although I wasn’t too strict when it came to the exact dimensions. The reconstructed watchtower at Vleuten-...

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