Little Tanks & Tiny People

I finished up my Greek hoplite today! The finished product is a bit rough around the edges, but I like it anyway. Free-handing the Athenian owl and olive branch on the shield was really fun. I also quite like the pose of the model with the helmet tilted back to reveal the face, just like in contemporary sculptures. I don’t like the slightly white sheen created by the matte varnish, though. I’ve been using Testors Dullcote rattle cans for a while, but the place I get it from no longer stocks it. I quite like Vallejo paint (it smells really good ;-) and decided to give their matte varnish a try. The Vallejo rattle can sprays much more ‘aggressively’, if that makes sense, than the Testors cans, so the white hue may just be caused by applying too much varnish at a time. Perhaps a thinner coat yields better results. A bit more practice is needed.

Apart from working on my Japanese terrain, I’ve also been slowly assembling my 75 mm hoplite. Sadly he didn’t go together nearly as well as the Roman legionary did. A lot of filing was required to get everything to (sort of) fit.   Here are all the separate components of the kit. The caster made some odd choices when choosing in which elements to cast the hoplite. Even with two people you have too few hands to dry assemble the kit to see if everything fits. So your only real choice is to glue two parts together, let them dry, and then add the next. If you then find out that the alignment of two of the parts wasn’t perfect, like I did, you’re bang out of luck. The many parts also mean that until the hoplite is assembled most of the way, the kit is very fragile. I therefore had to assemble the kit further than I would’ve liked before painting, which will make that process a bit more tricky. T his is the hoplite assembled most of the way and ready for paint. I found out too late t...

Don’t think I had forgotten about this fellow. He took a fair few hours to paint, but he's finished. I’m really reaching my limits at this larger scale, though. He looks pretty decent from a small distance, but from up close  you can tell I had a really hard time with the skin. His face is also a little off. I managed to paint eye whites and pupils - in 28 mm scale I tend to just stick with two black dots for the eyes - but he has this really disdainful look on his face now. Perhaps he is scolding some poor Gaul? I had a lot of fun free handing the pattern on the shield. Instead of the standard lig htning bolt design that everyone seems to go for, I opted for a simpler wreath with two lunulae.

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.  ...