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 !

Video Reports from Beachhead 2025

 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:

• On YouTube as a "playlist" to watch all videos in sequence
• On Madaxeman.com, with all of the videos embedded in a single page

Enjoy reliving early February at the English seaside !

The Roman Road Heads Down South

2025's PAW competition in deepest Devon (aka The South West's 2nd biggest Festival of ADLG & Pastys) provided me the opportunity to put the recently painted 28mm Triumverate / post Marian Reform Roman army on table in a Roman-themed event. 

This would see as many of the figures I've been painting and trailling on my blog in the past few months being shoehorned into a single army list, with maximum inclusivity trumping potential effectiveness by some margin!

The end result is these four 28mm video battle reports from PAW in Plymouth which you can watch in a YouTube playlist, or embedded on a single page on madaxeman.com.

The embedded video page also has a post-event summary from Nasty Hannibal.

Making 28mm Victrix elephants multi-national

 As heralded last week, I used some magnets to allow the two Victrix elephants in their kit to be used with interchangeable crew and accoutrements (OK, shields clipped to the sides of the howdahs), giving me Successor, Numidian and Roman elephants, just not all at the same time..

This is the full set of clip-on shields and glued-together crew for the two elephants.

You can (just about) see how rare earth magnets have been glued in place between the feet of the guys, so they can connect to a small patch of steel paper that I have glued down inside the base of each howdah to hold the crew in place firmly enough for gaming use.

Here's the "Red & Green" elephant with Successor shields and crew attached - you can see this as a Numidian elephant in an earlier blog post.

I spent quite some time carefully doing the crew as they are the most visual and visible part of the model. 

The elephant is quite a nice model and looks realistically proportioned and animated.

I copied the "bit in the middle" of the pike from the style I did for my Victrix pikemen - but for this figure that bit was included in the casting (moulding?) whereas for the pikemen I had to add it with rolled up paper!

The shield is attached with 2 magnets, as is the spear case at the back. I glued the magnets on the outside of the howdah for the shields, and then realised that they were strong enough to magnetize to another magnet through the walls of the howdah, so the spear case only has 1 maget outside and one on the inside wall of the howdah.

The "blue" elephant with blue crew. 

The shield pattern was a transfer which I blended in with mixed paint to reach the rim of the shield. 

Alwys worth adding eyes to elephants IMO - make sure to add dark black eyebrows too though or it just looks weird. 

I snuck in a couple of 15mm shield transfers as a small bit of decoration on the blanket. 

Here are both elephants togther in Successor kit.

 

And the Blue elephant with a very non-historical "Roman" shield and Roman crew.

I had these LBMS transfers going spare from a much older project, and while I know they are nowhere near the right period for a Republican Roman elephant they do have the advantage of being very "Roman", and also using up some shields and transfers I would otherwise have no need for!

They are now ready to take the field ...once I paint up the 100 or so Foundry legionaries !

28mm Numidian elephant

Victrix sell a rather clever multi-use elephant kit, with 2 elephants and crew for Roman, Greek or Numidian armies all included. 

For my Numidian allied contingent (for the ADLG lists) I have pulled together a set of Numidian crew and some magnetize-on shields, all of which can be added to an elephant to make it "Numidian", with the magnets meaning its not committed to that role full time.

The kit comes with 6 "halves" allowing you to set the 2 elephants up with different alignments and arrangements of legs.

As these are to be used for multiple armies with different crew I went for a very simple plain cloth on the back of the elephant, and block colours on the howdah. 

LBMS do sell wraparound transfers for both, but that would have meant buying lots more identical elephants !

Rather irritatingly I had used up all of the dozen "animal skin" shield transfers in the LBMS/Victrix pack on the actual soldiery, so had to cobble together this rather not-quite-as-convincing hand painted set of skins for the two shields magnetized to the sides of the howdah.

Again the crew's javelins were replaced with plastic broom bristles, as these would certainly snap if you left the original Victrix ones in place and tried to actually use the elephant in gameplay. 

The mahout's hook is also rather brittle and has already been broken off, shortened and glued during painting - long before getting into combat 

28mm Numidian Light Cavalry

 Next up in the Numidian allied contingent (after the infantry) are the famed Numidian Light Horsemen.

These have been painted in exactly the same way as the infantrymen, with Speedpaint Holy White on a white base layer, topped off with Vallejo white for the clothing and a couple of layers of Darkoath Flesh Contrast for the skintones 

Again I went for a fairly subdued and simple palette for the Commander, with a plain red cloak and red ribbons on the banner & standard.

 

The horses are just a straight layer of Contrast on white - the "black" horse is Black Templar.

 

LBMS transfers (these are however only sold by Victrix directly) for the win, with some blending and painting-over on the edges of the transfers to get them to wrap around the edges of the shields.

I kept the horses in the main fairly pale for that desert rider look - the rope is just Speedpaint Leather on the white base. 

I did replace most of the spears with plastic broom bristles on these, as the Victrix spears are often rather flimsy so for ones that may get handled a more robust spear is better - even if drilling out the hands is a bit of a PITA sometimes. 

Next up is the Elephant!