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At Warfare last year I lent my now-venerable 28mm Patrician Roman army to someone to use in the ADLG competition.
The paint job is a little darker than I'd probably do today (aka its slathered in ArmyPainter Soft Tone to within an inch of it's life, and so looks like it's been on campaign in Germania without a Legionary Laundry Cart in sight for a whole winter season) however seeing it on table again made me somewhat nostalgic for the days when it was pretty much my only 28mm army - so I've decided to give it a bit of love and attention.
That currently means a slow stepwise addition of some fairly generic "Gothic/Frankish" infantry from the super-cheap Wargames Atlantic "Generic Hairy Blokes" set (some of whom have already appeared here), and also this rather spiffy "EIR" era bolt shooter from Warlord Games.
I'm aware that some of the Warlord Imperial Romans can look a little on the small side compared to the more recent Victrix sets, and even the GB Late Romans who make up much of my army's legionaries - but this bolt shooter will, if it ever gets used, stand on it's own so the size comparison won't matter at all.
I am also aware that the lorica segmenta armour is wildly anachronistic for a "Patrician" era Very Late Roman army, but again, this looks so cool that I can live with that any day of the week!
The whole set is hard plastic, with just the two crewmen.
For a piece that will rarely be used I decided to do a simple Contrasts paint job, with the ArmyPainter Leather being used on the wooden parts of the bolt shooter itself as well as the belts and petruges of the legionaries.
The armour and steel arms of the bolt shooter are done in my new go-to of Enchanted Steel, again an ArmyPainter paint (thanks Will Morriss for suggesting it to me!).
The chap with the bandaged head is especially cool - the "dried bloodstain" on the front of his head bandage is down to accidental drift of the Dark Oath Flesh GW paint I used as a base layer on all of the flesh on the figures - it came out better than I could have done deliberately, so I'll happily take that and run with it too!
The artillery are now ready and waiting to ping some barbarian leaders at unfeasible distances!
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 !
Having lent my 28mm Patrician Roman army to someone to use at last year's Warfare ADLG event, actually seeing this venerable army on table gave me a pang of nostalgia for what was one of my very first 28mm ancients armies (OK, of my "second wind" of buying and painting 28mm figures anyway).
Having painted up lots more stuff since then I'd sort of convinced myself that these guys were just, well, not all that nice, and a little too overindulged on the "soft tone Army Painter wash" front to make them look overly battle-worn.
The reality on the Farnborough tabletop however was much brighter and nicer than I remembered, with the notable exception of the always-shoehorned-in "gothic" foot I used as Foederate infantry.
These guys were actually Dark Ages Scots from Old Glory - nice enough figures, and perfectly fine playing at being Vikings, Saxons or a lot of other hairy barbarians - but always a bit of a stretch when used as Frankish axemen in a Late Roman army.
With Wargames Atlantic releasing a new "they could be anything" box of Romano-Barbarian warriors around that time I immediately resolved to buy a set and try and paint up some properly "Frankish" infantry to go with my Romans, but using a slightly brighter colour palette (OK, not so much ink wash) to give them a bit more ping.
And these are the results:
The front rank are all Wargames Atlantic figures from their Dark Ages Army Builder set, painted with "Breton" stripey tunics and given a random range of shields and weapons - mostly axes to make them Franks.
All of the stripes have been done with the classic "fat dark line, thinner lighther line" technique using paints from the newish Army Painter Fanatic 6-part triad ranges.
The guys at the back are an odd bunch - picked up from a Warlord stand at a show, they were a blister of "Warlord Resin" figures which I think are mostly from an "SPQR: Dacia & Sarmatia - Dacian Tribesmen with javelins" set, which came with a few slingers as well.
These resin figures came with open hands making it a simple job for me to add in some axes from the Wargames Atlantic sprue (and the bits box) to make them into "Franks"
The shield patterns are also a mix - the "Roman" one is a LBMS transfer on a Gripping Beast plastic shield, whereas the others are waterslide transfers from Battle Flag, which don't quite fit on the Wargames Atlantic round shields but are close enough that with a bit of blending of paint colours and some layers of varnish to seal them in they just about work better than me trying to paint them myself.
Here's a "YouTube Shorts" video of them rotating slowly on a turntable.
All in all I'm pretty happy with them, and I will be painting up a few more bases to ake up a decent sized block of Frankish infantry to fight alongside my long-neglected Late Romans in the coming months.
Looking more specifically at the Wargames Atlantic figures, they are, if truth be told, perhaps a smidge on the bland side when it comes to variety of dynamic poses - and there isn't a huge amount of deeply cut detail on them either. As such, using "proper" layered painting techniques like I did on these ones is very much the way to go I think (rather than relying on washes and Speedpaints).
But, at £30 for 48 perfectly servicable figures, honestly, what's not to like - especially if they can be padded out with some random bits-box purchases from the discount bin at a show too!
Having posted some pictires of some rather large 15mm War Wagons earlier this year, now is the time for something genuinely massive - a 28mm War Wagon.
A few quid via PayPal later and I was the proud owner of two handily generic wagons, painted far better than I could ever hope to do myself - all they really needed now was some crew!
The solution to that was a couple of sprues of Perry Medieval Mercenaries from a box shared between me and Dave from the Podcast in my ongoing efforts to tempt him into painting 25mm.
This was enough for two wagons, and these are the first lot of crew, stuck to a couple of sawn-off lollipop sticks to give a genuine wood effect ont the cab floor (yeah sure..).
And here they are in the first wagon:
Matching the style of the wagon meant eschewing Contrasts for these guys, and it has shown me that perhaps I need to invest in some proper "triads" of paints going forward as the different reds and yellows I own don't seem to have too much difference once they are layered onto the crews' clothing.
The next wagon is kinda green, so to match that I am definately going to by some new paints as all my own greens are either rather WW2, or are super-bright for painting Chinese and Eastern/Asiatic ancient troops.
But, for now, I'm pretty happy with how well my guys match the pro-painted wagon.
This year's event at Beachhead 2025 L'Art de la Guerre 28mm competition allowed me to wheel out yet another Successor/Macedonian army from the collection, as this time my generic 28mm mostly-Victrix guys would be appearing as the Lysimachid Successors.
The event was a 5-game themed event in which everyone had to use at least 2 of Elephants, Camels or War Wagons - hence this rather odd AI-generated image of camels, elephants and a Victorian Bathing Machine seemingly converted into a War Wagon, posed by an English seaside resort pier!
Anyways, my choice was to take 2 Elephants, with some newly minted Victrix plastic kit elephants raring to get on table and a lack of either war wagons or camels in my 28mm collection also contributing significantly to my decision-making process.
I also wanted to use all 6 units of these 28mm Victrix Successor Pikemen figures I had gone through the effort and pain of assembling, and then painting - having only managed to field armies with 4 Pikemen units up until now.
Add in a vague plan to use all of the different Successor armies at some point in time and I ended up with the Early Successor Lysimachid list from the Battle of Ipsos.
After surviving the trip down to Bournemouth, and also a night in a rather cheaper-than-we-had-hoped hotel, Beachhead 2025 played host to the Lysimachid Successors in 5 different battles against the Carthaginians (elephants), Italian Communes (war wagons), Phyrrus of Epirus (elephants), the Classical Indians (take a wild stab in the dark why don't you?) and the Hussites of Jan Zizka (war wagons again, of course)!
The full set of 5 YouTube Video Battle reports from this fiesta of 28mm action, plus an accompanying episode of the Madaxeman Podcast are now all posted online for you to watch and listen to in various formats:
Having just gotten back from plating ADLG at Beachhead (where I somehow ended up 2nd in the 28mm pool with 3 wins and 2 defeats - go figure!), I have managed to quickly upload the "top 3" lists from the 15mm and 28mm competitions to the ADLG Wiki on this site.
