Little Tanks & Tiny People

I already teased in  my 2024 roundup that I was working on an Athenian hoplite army. I’m now a fair way into what will be my largest army to date. I’ve finished 48 hoplites, 12 archers, 12 slingers and 8 cavalry, for a total of 80 figures. I’ve still got another pack of 48 hoplites to go, but I think I may take a little breather and paint something else for a little bit. All figures are from Victrix. Assembly is rather complex, with each figure consisting of a separate body, head, arms, shield, spear and sword. Just assembling the hoplites took four or five hobby sessions. These hoplites are from the older Victrix kit. I really like the sculpts, but there could have been a bit more variety in the head sculpts. I would also have liked some more heads with Corinthian helmets. Both of these problems are solved in the new kit, however. I did pick up a spare sprue from the new kit on Ebay, just to add in some alternative head sculpts. Spikey phalanx! Shield transfers are from Little ...

I finally got around to taking pictures of the finished spectators. They are a mix of Steve Barber and Sally 4th. Both ranges have their pros and cons. The Steve Barber figures are more varied, but aren’t cast particularly well. The Sally 4th figures, on the other hand, are very clean but are all quite similar. Together, though, they add a lot of character to the amphitheatre.

I’ve finished painting up some gladiators and a lion to go with my amphitheatre ! All figures are by Foundry. The sculpting and casting of these metal figures are of a very high standard, but sadly my order was missing a spear. Fortunately I still had the plastic Fireforge Games weapon sprue from customising my Uruk-hai crossbowmen , so replacing it was simple enough. Slightly more annoying was that two of the figures didn’t come with rectangular scuta as shown on the Foundry website. Instead, they have these weird, stylised figure-of-eight type shields that I associate more with bronze age Greece than with Rome. I’m a little annoyed that I didn’t realise this when my order arrived. It’s been over six months now, so it feels a little late to contact Foundry about it. In any case, I’m still really pleased with the end result. Each figure has its own colour scheme and listing all colours feels a bit excessive. I'm not sure if it comes across, but I’ve used three different skin co...

Painting is done! I first primed the whole thing by hand with regular wood primer and then gave it a couple of coats of Rustoleum chalky finish furniture paint from a rattle can. According to the can, the colour is called ‘jute’. I’d call it off white or bone white, though. Anyway, I then gave the whole thing a very heavily thinned down black wash, followed by a light dusting of the ‘jute’ again and a drybrush of white.    I then painted all the details such as the arches, seats, pavement and arena. Considering the size of this thing, detailing took a fair while. I probably spent about four hours just painting the individual cobble stones on the pavement. Weathering the amphitheatre was a lot of going backwards and forwards, adding a colour, not liking it, removing most of it again, trying another colour, removing most of that as well, and so on. But I think I ended up with something pretty nice looking. I used predominantly acrylic paints, apart from a final pass with some ...

Time for a change of pace! If I’m honest, I was getting quite fed up with painting Rohan warriors. They’re very laborious to paint and there’s so many of them (12 down, 38 left to go...). I’ll get back to them at some point, but for now I need to do something completely different.   And what better project to get your mojo back than to build this epic amphitheatre by Sarissa Precision! I had been ogling it online for years, but last week it arrived on my doorstep as a birthday present from my wife. I’m not quite sure where I’ll put it once it’s done (it’s huge!), but it is insanely cool. I didn’t count the number of parts, but there’s a lot. For reference, each (semi)column consists of 12 parts and there’s 34 of them! I’ve made a few tiny changes to the design. Most significantly, I permanently attached the removable arena by gluing the entire thing onto a large sheet of polystyrene. This gave the whole piece some additional strength and also meant that I could hide the large...

Over the last two years since I got back into the hobby I’ve painted several hundred minis and have slowly but steadily improved my painting skills. I thought it would be fun to test my painting skills by doing something I’ve never done before, painting a 1/10th scale bust. For my first attempt I didn’t feel like purchasing a pricy high end bust, because I wasn’t quite sure whether my painting chops would be up to the challenge. I did a bit of looking around online and found a decent looking second-hand bust made of cast alabaster (ground up stone mixed with a resin). The bust is a copy of the famous Diana/Artemis of Versaille, a Roman marble statue that is thought to be a copy of a Greek original in bronze that is now lost. Analysis of paint residues on classical statues has shown that these originally were not the white colour they are today, but were often painted in very bright (and garish) colours. It therefore seemed fitting for my first bust to be a copy of a classical statue....

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-...

It’s time for the fourth and final part of my Roman army for Basic Impetus. It took me almost two months, but with this single cavalry base the army is finally complete! The miniatures are from the Hät Imperial Roman Auxiliary Cavalry kit and I painted them up to match my auxiliary infantry . The painting schemes for the horses are as follows: Black horse: everything Citadel Abaddon Black with drybrush of Vallejo Neutral Grey, horse tack Vallejo Flat Earth  Dark brown horse: body Vallejo Charred Brown, manes, tail and hooves Citadel Abaddon Black with drybrush of Vallejo Neutral Grey, horse tack Vallejo Flat Earth   Light brown horses: body Vallejo Flat Earth, lower legs Citadel White Scar, manes and tail Citadel Morghast Bone with wash of Vallejo Flat Earth, horse tack Vallejo Charred Brown Now, after finishing these tiny buggers I may take a little break and work on something else for a bit before starting on a second army for them to fight...

As promised last time, here are the auxiliary archers for my steadily growing Roman army. They are a mix of Zvezda minis from the RomanAuxiliary Infantry box that I also used to make my auxiliary infantry , and archers from Hät’s Imperial Roman Auxiliaries box. The figures differ a little in style, with the Hät minis looking slightly more cartoony. But they are all about the same size and work pretty well together. Especially when painted the same colour scheme. The Zvezda archers come in two nearly identical poses. The three poses offered by Hät, on the other hand, are much more varied. Together, I think they make a nice varied looking unit.   All figures are clearly supposed to represent archers from the eastern part of the Empire, wearing conical helmets and long tunics. I therefore decided to paint their tunics in a different colour then my regular auxiliary infantry, to make them look as their own separate unit. The tunics were painted Citadel Morghast Bone with a horizont...

I had a couple days off last week and spent a good portion of that time painting up three bases worth of Zvezda auxiliary infantry , 21 minis in total. Like the legionaries I painted earlier , these auxiliarii have excellent sculpts and come in a nice variety of poses. These auxiliarii seem to have been recruited in the northern provinces of the Empire. For one, they are wearing trousers under their tunics, a very un-Roman fashion statement but pretty useful in colder climates. Secondly, the minis are noticeably taller than their legionary counterparts, although I doubt that was intentional on Zvezda’s part. Although noticeable, the size difference isn’t that great to be annoying when the minis are placed side by side. For painting these figures I used pretty much the exact same recipe as for my legionaries , only substituting Citadel Caliban Green for the red I used on the tunics and shields. I really liked the step-by-step picture I made last time, so I made one again: And after basi...

This is my first post in about a month, but not because I’ve been twiddling my thumbs. I’ve been working on a teeny tiny Roman army! I’ve wanted to assemble a Roman army for quite a while, but the tedium of painting dozens and dozens of near identical figures has always stopped me. About a month ago, I bit the bullet and decided that I would build an army for Basic Impetus published by the aptly named Dadi & Piombo. The armies needed for this game are relatively small and you can use miniatures in whatever scale you like. Another cool aspect of Basic Impetus is that it uses multibasing, so you can create very personalised and impressive looking armies.   Scale wise, I chose the somewhat uncommon 1:72. Uncommon for wargaming, that is, because it’s probably the most common scale for model kits. Firstly, size and detail wise it sits nicely in between 15mm and 28mm scale, striking the perfect balance between aesthetics and the amount of time it takes to build a decently sized ar...

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.