Victrix Spanish - 28mm Roman-era warriors

The Republican Roman army I built a couple of years ago using mostly Foundry legionaries has always been whingeing away in its Really Useful Box asking me to get it some more interesting and colourful subject, mercenary and allied troops.. 

..and, amazingly, a few sprues of Victrix Spanish warriors somehow found their way into my eBay basket and voila, the Romans have some Iberian mercenaries!

In my continuing attempts to try as many painting styles as possible, I initially painted these with a matt white undercoat, and then applied Army Painter Holy White to the, erm, "white" ones, GW Aggaros Dunes to the "yellow" ones and did the "red" ones in Army Painter Blood Red.

I then painted over most of these "contrast" base coats with block colours, leaving the folds in the tunics as the lowlights - the contrast all bleed slightly into the top layers (not as much as the ArmyPainter first generation of these paints did though!) which also helps soften the distinction between shading and block colours.

The "experiment" bit of this process came as I opted to use AK paint pens to do most of the block colouring - the "white" ones using AK RCM034 Flat White, the "yellow" ones using AK RCM012 Wood Base and the "red" ones with AK RCM003 Signal Red. 

The pens have a "felt tip" nib that is fairly broad even though it comes to a point, so they actually worked quite well on these figures as the nib is way too big to go into the creases of the tunics, leaving the darker underlights (?) pretty much intact whilst skimming over the topmost layers.

The white in particular needed a few coats and run-overs with the pen to get decent coverage, with the yellow having more opacity but still needing a couple of goes. 

Annoyingly I managed somehow to break one of the spears, and also one of the swords when I was taking them outside to spray varnish (both in the back row). These have - as is usual with Victrix - very thin spears, and there will be casualties, such that I'm not even sure I will repair these two as it's very hard to see unless I point it out!  

The pens are sadly not sharp enough to do the patterns on the tunics, so those had to be done with a regular brush and paint - I managed to do the "darker narrow inner, lighter wider outer" type of stripes on some of the tunics, and got two narrow stripes on others.

They (of course) have LBMS transfers, which I found fitted really well for these figures. I painted the edges of the shields with ArmyPainter Enchanted Steel and/or Fanatic Bronze before applying the transfers, with the Enchanted Steel in particular being very flow-ey (..?) so it just runs nicely into the edges of the embossed edges and bosses to save on the need for all that much blacklining and infilling later on after the transfers are on. 

You can just about see a bit of proper blacklining on some of these shields, but as I've said before, these  transfers seem to fit absolutely perfectly on this set.

I now have 3 bases of swordsmen/javelineers to fight alongside my Roman Legions. 

Frankly I'm astonished how good these look - even if I say so myself! 

There are also a couple of javelin armed skirmishers, as the sprues I had seemed to make up 20 figures somehow - seems like an odd number, but hey! 

 

No LBMS transfers for these shields on the sheet though ! 

Here they are next to my Foundry "Classic Legionaries" 

They are a bit taller, but nothing to worry about at all on the tabletop. 

And here is a Nauk Nauk animation of the guys in action !

We're back.. and we have News!

 A midweek, mid afternoon podcast assembly stagger even deeper into 2026 with an astonishing 2nd podcast of the Spring to tempt your earlobes in this time where knee-deep pollen is coating the UK in a Vallejo-challenging yellow blanket.

There is discussion of what's been on the painting table for us all, the pro's and con's of stripping a bunch of angry  Scotsmen, what is white paint called when it's not white and comes from a pen, is "decent food" at a gaming centre an oxymoron, and whether there is an equivalent to the Merlin app to allow us all to decipher which wargamer is which, simply from the sound of their distant whingeing about bad dice.

Andy's Quiz also returns with a Knopfler-esque "Dire Straits" themed episode - but, fresh from the Barcelona "it's more than a rumour" mill, Grandpa Dave brings us news direct from El Kreator himself that a v5 of ADLG has now reached slightly beyond "vague thought on some future to-do list" to now stand at the "twinkle in El Kreator's eye" stage.. 

..which of course prompts us all to have a good old chunter about what things (as well as folding in the FAQ - of course..) we might look for in the next, still quite-some-way-off edition of L'Art de la Guerre.

What do you think of that..! 

Access the Podcast here on Podbean, or through your usual podcast provider

 

A few bits of Korean stuff, in 1:1 scale

 A recent holiday saw me passing through Seoul for a few days, where I was fortunate enough to stumble across some "ancient & medieval" Korean stuff along the way - and here it is 

(If you are reading this on the front page of my site, you'll need to click through to the article on the Blogger site using that link to see the videos)! 

This was a demo of Korean swordsmanship (and spearmanship?) take at the top of Namsan Mountain. During the Joseon Dynasty, Namsan was considered a sacred shamanistic site, but is now a lovely scenic park with the Seoul Tower standing atop the central hill.

There was also a bit of pike action too. 

We also visited the Korean National Museum, where it seems that most of the stuff is pottery-related, with the War Museum being where the cool wargaming-relevant bits are (of course). 

However there were a few unusual pieces - this Silla-era armour being a highlight:

For the uniform painters out there, this also looked - from a distance - like a good bit of battle planning, however on closer inspection it's actually a manual for organising a royal wedding procession! 

Slightly weirdly there is also this genuine Greek helmet. 

 

The story is that it was awarded to a Korean runner at the first modern-era Athens Olympics, when Korea was under the control of Japan, meaning that the chap was running under a Japanese flag at the time. 

Eventually, after many trials and tribulations, and many years later, he did end up with the "helmet prize" in his hands - which is now seen as a momentous moment in forming the modern Korean national psyche. 

Finally, in the ICN airport Duty Free area on our way home, a few more reenactors in costume.

I'd actually been to the Korean Military Museum a few years ago - the photos from that trip can also be seen here 

The 100YW English go down South, hunting pasties.

 This year's PAW was themed around 1345: Europe after the Bastards.  1345 was the year of Sir Baldwin Bastard’s death – the year the Bastard family lost their principal seat at Efford, a suburb of Plymouth, so it had local relevance too!

I took the opportunity to use some Perry plastic longbowmen and foot knights in a 100YW army, even though the figures I had were really from the WotR ranges, so rather too late for proper 100YW. 

Either way, the army had no mounted units, and a lot of shooting firepower - and you can now see how it did in these 4, rather belated video battle reports from PAW 2026.

Game 1 - vs The Swiss

Game 2 - vs the Navarrese

Game 3 vs the Medieval Spanish

Game 4 vs The Swiss Again

You can also see the reports on a single page on my website here:

SU 25 Frogfoot in 6mm from Pendraken

 The strange combination of having played a bit of team Yankee in 1/300th scale lately, and also needing to get a Pendraken order for MDF bases over their postage threshold saw me picking up a SU25 Frogfoot model in 1/300th scale from their "Raiden" aircraft range. 

Like a lot of my recent painting, I approached this as a bit of an experiment to try and create an effect I'd struggled with in the past - this time to have the etched outlines of the panels on the aircraft visible. 

 

Amazingly this seems to have worked, with a base coat of Army Painter Fanatic Barren Dune followed by a wash of Army Painter Dark Tone, and then a sort-of drybrush / "picking out the details" combination approach to turn the whole thing sandy coloured whilst leaving the wash to pick out the excellent and sharp detail on this little model.

I then used a couple of WW2 German tank cammo Vallejo colours to conjure up the rest of the 4-tone cammo scheme for the jet, and found some tiny stickers in the bits box to add the red stars.

 

The diamond on the tail fin is just made up - I had a set of Desert Rats transfers in the bits box, so it's actually a WW2 British tank identification marking turned through 45 degrees, which I think looks OK (unless I tell you what it actually is..!). 

 

 A simple but effective paint job on a small but very nice model. 

Dipping into Early Medieval Cavalry

 Another tidy-up project to be completed recently has been to dip (using the fantastic, non-smelly Biostrip 2.0 - which you can buy on Amazon UK using that affiliate link) and repaint some rather tatty Mirliton  (mostly) medieval lancers which I've had since winning them at a competition in Rome and then taking them to a competition Greece some 300 years ago. 

With the ability to print off waterslide transfers to supplement my rather basic shield design painting skills now a firm part of my repertoire, re-doing these cavalry will hopefully allow me to think about retiring some rather chunky 3D printed Early Medieval lancers that were one of my earliest 3D print purchasing experiments as well.

Add in some self-printed flags (with the edges all painted of course!) and I am now the owner of some rather bolt and positive-looking, Spanish/Italian-esque Medium Knights, all with admittedly rather eclectic and random heraldry (but who's counting eh?)

 

Forged in Battle Palmyrans - on printed horses!

 A trawl through the bits box recently unearthed a large number of riderless horses, and an almost-equal number of horseless riders... so what else to do other than cobble together some Frankenstein-like mixups of stuff I had clearly decided not to bother painting at some point in the past! 

Leading the way were these 6 FiB riders, which a bit of detective work revealed were from their Palmyran range. 

To be honest they are so generic that they went into my "Roman" drawer, and may appear as Romans, Palmyrans, Byzantines or anything else with a uniform look and a javelin in hand. 

In my current spirit of trying different painting techniques I've also done some very unsubtle "highlighting" on the blue cloaks to try and give them a "works at tabletop distances but looks weird close up" style...  and I think I've certainly nailed at least 50% of that target with these guys! 

The two horses nearest the camera in this shot are almost certainly Essex "generic" types, but the front 4 are all from the 3D Breed Numidians I painted up a while back, where my eBay purchase contained more horses than riders. 

These are some of the nicest horses I think I've seen in 15mm, but they are a tad brittle - so hopefully they can take the weight of the metal Forged in Battle riders!

Rear Supporting Romans

Even though I've been playing ADLG for ages now, I still have, well, "legions" of figures based up for earlier rulesets that are probably never going to see light of day under the ADLG army lists.

Some of my favourite "Roman" figures are the Late/Early Imperial Roman Archers from Donnington's originals ranges - their Imperial Roman archers paint up really nicely, and were much more prevalent in both DBM and FoG armies where units of 8-12 figures flitted across the tabletop, or indeed individual "psiloi" bases acted as rear support in integrated units with legionaries or auxilia. 

In ADLG the numbers of Roman skirmishers is much smaller (ish..) in that you get 0-4 units in most Imperial Roman armies, each of which is a single "psiloi" base of two figures... and so there ends up being are a lot of  'spare' ex-FoG and DBM light infantry archers kicking around the streets of Rome looking for gainful employment .. which brings us to Rear Support.

In ADLG the concept of Rear Support also exists, but is generally represented either by having different units of infantry with archers in their second rank (ie having a duplicate legion, some with integral archers on each base, some without... and I may be mad, but I'm not that mad..), or more often than not, by having some marker-bases to show which units have "Rear support" in any given list. 

So, after far too long I've finally bitten the bullet and rebased some of these archers to become Rear Support markers. 

They are based in pairs on 20x20 to give a decent enough sized marker to e noticable, but to also obviously not be a "base" of Light Infantry.

Some of them are also new figures that I bought recently - yes, despite having planty of spares I decided that I simply had to have some more of the "eastern" ones, seen here at the front. 

That's partly as they look really cool, and partly so they can be rear support for my Byzantines as well. 

And here they are in action, supporting some Donnington Auxilia and some Old Glory Legionaries 

You can find the archers in Donningtons catalogue here.

I Sea Peoples...

 Back in the mists of time a strange unknowable group landed on the shores of a far away land, ready and eager for war... 

..but enough of the players at the last edition of the Devonian Classic ADLG event in Brixham, Devon - instead it's now long overdue for me to share some photos and super-abridged battle reports of how my Sea Peoples army did in their 4 battles on the shores of Torbay back at the beginning of last December!  

The reports are pretty sketchy I'm afraid, partly as I didn't take many photos, but mainly as a load of real-world stuff happened right after the event finished which prevented me from cracking on with the reports whilst they were still reasonably fresh in my memory.

But anyways, there are some decent photos of Biblical-era troops in battle for you to have a gander at, as well as the army list for my partially-successful Sea Peoples Horde as well, so certainly worth sharing anyways in this post that appears on my website now. 

The Sea Peoples' Leader can Sea You Now !