28mm Hellenistic Cavalry

My Successor/Hellenistic project moves on apace, with a recent spell of dry(ish) weather allowing me to do some outdoor spray undercoat, and then matt varnishing to make a dent in the cavalry contingent of this almost-all 28mm Victrix army.

An ever-increasing proportion of my painting is drifting towards Contrast (and Speed..) Paints, and the horses in this army I think will all end up being completed in this "so good it feels cheaty and a bit dirty" medium. 

 

Agaros Dunes is the leopard pelt colour here, with the firm favourite of Warlord Holy White for the grey horse. 

These are Heavy Cavalry lancers - I replaced the Vixtrix-supplied lances immediately, as they are very obviously not going to stand up to any sort of wargame handling at all, and drilled out the hands (manually) to accommodate home-made spears from 1.1mm (0.45") styrofoam round rods from Plastruc. 

These are really flexible, so will bend but not snap while also being really lightweight - a great combination where metal spears of this length would no doubt end up getting caught while being handled and then would break off the guys hands at the wrist. 

The Plastruct material is also really soft, so I was easily able to squash the ends of each spear flat, and then cut it into a V shape to form spear points which are also wider than the spear shafts.

If you want to pick some up for yourself, here's an affiliate link to eBay UK https://ebay.us/QLbKOr (and if you end up buying anything from it I'll geta teeny tiny commission from eBay too!) 

These are javelin-armed regular cavalry - I think the spears are a mix of the Victrix originals and also some slightly more robust Gripping Beast ones from their Roman and Arab boxes. 

If you keeping all of the spare arms you can then cut some spear-holding hands off at the wrist, do the same with the Victrix guys wrists and then glue the GB hands and spears to the Victrix guys arms to give your troops more robust spears, straight out of the bits box  

The white clothing on these cavalry is normal white paint layered over a base of Holy White - shield patterns from some spare Hoplite waterlide transfers, on a shield painted with a Contrast Orange which I think gives a really good "it could be burnished bronze" effect.

More pics to come over the next few days. 

Painting 28mm Successors from Victrix: The Light Troops

I've finally managed to get some of the 28mm Victrix Successors I previewed in a half-painted state a few weeks ago finished, and into the light box for some professional-grade (ahem) photos. 

The context to this is that I'm building my first ever Successor/Alexandrian 28mm army, and so with a huge range of troops to choose from in Successor armies I didn't want to do my usual "try and make and spray the whole army in one go" thing, but instead break the task down into manageable chunks that I could stay motivated to complete - hence deciding to start with the "light" troops

That ended up meaning that my first (OK second - I have completed and taken photos of some test bases before now) batch of figures for this army ended up being Light Infantry, Javelinmen, Peltasts and a couple of bases of Galatian crazy heavy infantry (because, well, they are really cool figures.)

And, the results are now in, with this smattering of photos plus a whole lot more on the website :

The Successor painting page on the website has all of these and more, as well as some commentary on how I approached painting them in a "Contrast-plus" style.

28mm Successors

 Last year at Warfare I turbocharged a rather slow-motion project to collect and paint a Successor army in 28mm by picking up a load of mostly-Victrix plastis figures to give me more than enough to cook up most Successor armies.

I'd already done a couple of test bases (elephants, some Thracians and a slinger unit) but with real life getting in the way for much of this year I'd really struggled to make time and desk space for painting and assembling the rest of the army... until quite recently when I made a stab at getting most of the lighter units ready to put on table. 

This meant some kitbashing with the plastic spares box, mostly working with one of the original Victrix boxes of Hellenistic Skirmishers - a 50+ body box with plenty of javelin and other light troops in it - together with having a bash at the couple of units of Galatians that every self-respecting Seleucid army needs to have in the middle of their line.

I decided to go for a "Contrast First" painting style for the army, starting with a matt white undercoat and then doing all of the flesh on these skirmishers and Thracians in Darkoath Flesh. 

This was almost good enough just for me to go with it for the army, but with the Galatians in particulat warranting a little more effort I then decided to add some rather rough and ready "impressionistic" musculature to the figures in an effort to see if I could do this to a decent enough standard that it wouldn't look totally rubbish!

This was the first real pass at it, using Vallejo Dark Flesh to pick out muscles on the figures. If you zoom in you can see its fairly basic stuff, but I did find these Victrix figures were ideally sculpted to help you identify which bits to pick out and highlight.

I then added a mix of mostly subdued colours to the skirmishers - the white is actually a Warlord Games paint called Holy White that seems to give a good effect without going "too" grey.

The Galatians got a bit more demarcation of their musculature as well at this stage, with some Sunny Skin Tone from Vallejo for additional highlights

After the usual rigmarole of white / gloss varnish / waterslide transfer / gloss varnish with a bit of Microsol and Microset thrown in for good measure the Galatian then had Battle Flag shield patterns too. 

These are the "Thracians" - they are Victrix Hellenistic Skirmisher bodies with added cloaks left over from various figures, some Gothic and Davian heads, and 2-part "falx's" made from the (over-) long curved sword blades from the Fireforge Arab Cavalry box glued onto one side of a figures fist, and a cut-off bit of spear (I think from the Gripping Beast Romans, as it looks pretty thick) glued to the other side. 

There are also plenty of javelinmen and archers - the guys with extra spears behind their shields are soaking up some of the excess javelins in the Victrix pack which have been snipped in half and glued either side of the fist holding the shield. 

The Galatians look particularly jolly with their shields all finished (with painted edges to match the transfer in most cases).  I just about managed to fit 7 on a standard 60x40 base, which gives a very dense formation feel IMO.

And here are the rest of the guys, with sand + woodstain basing, just now waiting for some touchups in bronze (post-matt varnishing) and for me to find and apply some static grass and grass tufts - which are somewhere in the house but are yet to be found! 

Once they are done I'll put some lightbox photos up of the finished articles 

  

 

   

Victrix Fireflies... at last...

 What with Victrix selling their 1/144th scale tanks in rather unruly packs of 6, and already having some of their "standard" Shermans the OCD Wargamer in me has been dithering for quite some time about whether I should replace my perfectly servicable (..yet not quite the same as the Victrix ones) Fireflies, I think from PIthead, with some from Victrix to match the rest of the fleet. 

Having been unable to find any on eBay at a sensible price, this had been going on for some time until finally a mate suddenly decided he wanted some too, so the possibility of a pack-split became the solution to my tight-fisted dilemma

And this is the result:

Yes, three rather spiffy British Firefly Shermans, with 17pdr long barrel guns painted in Vallejo Tank Colour Bronze Green. 

The guns were so long - and also so thin - that I managed to break one in half while putting the transfers onto the front of the tank hull, and then a second one also snapped whilst showing it to my webcam when recording the latest Madaxeman Podcast. 

So, I replaced the barrels by snipping them off flush with the mantlet, drilling a hole (very easy with this plastic) and glueing in place a length of broom bristle. They were pretty much exactly as thick as the barrel supplied with the tanks, and are flexible enough to never break. 

The final touch was to add a smoke extractor at the end of each barrel. 

This I cheatingly got away with by just dabbing a blob of extra paint on the end of the bristle, which at this scale gives a bit extra thickness that does actually look close enough for government work to being a muzzle brake smoke extractor thingy.  

Job done!

28mm Kitbashed Thracians - WiP

 One of the back-burner projects I have is a 28mm Hellenistic army - I've been slowly buying the figures over the last year but not really starting it until I have them all in hand (and have finished many other projects first too!).

However... 

...I've been wondering if I can kitbash some Thracians out of the Victrix Peltasts and their Dacian Warriors kit, with the Dacians providing heads, arms - and romphias - and cloaks from some of the excess spares that Adam has collected in building his own proper Dacian army.

I've done a single test base so far, which is yet to have static grass and tufts added, and is also yet to be matt varnished, but is now at a sufficient WiP stage to be worth sharing:

 LBMS "peltast" transfers of course, picking out the more "Thracian" (yeah, right...) ones. If you look carefully you can see that some of the hands are "reversed" where I decided it was perhaps too hard to trim off the wrists and repose left hands to right hands - but you do need to look quite closely indeed!

I'll try and get them finished off and varnished in the next week or so. 

 

10mm WW2 - The Allies

The "refurbish and replace" campaign for my WW2 Blitzkrieg Commander collection is now gathering pace. 

Or, put another way, painting stripes on German tanks is a right PITA so I have given myself a break and instead managed to bash out the entire allied contingent in a week or so as they have no cammo at all!

The end result is a force containing models and figures from Pithead, Pendraken, Victrix, Butlers Printed Models, Minifigs and Arrowhead, all of which have been painted in a fetching and thankfully simple Bronze Green + drybrush scheme and based using my new basing system of stained sand on mdf bases. 

There are loads more photos of these models on the Madaxeman website as well as a whole page of the Germans too

(I did cheat a little by using the Vallejo German Track colour, but hopefully no-one will notice....)

Victrix Shermans

Victrix, Pithead and then Pendraken Shermans

Arrowhead Cromwell

British Para support units 

Arrowhead infantry with Pithead motorcyclists added in

Pendraken Priest and Sherman Flail

Minifigs Bren Carriers

Recce units from a variety of sources

Pithead British Para Jeep

Butlers Printed Models British trucks and Quad tractor

Staghound from Pithead

Churchill Crocodile from Arrowhead

Pithead Artillery Observer up a ladder strapped to a truck (!)

There are loads more photos of these models on the Madaxeman website as well as a whole page of the Germans too