It's a Ballista!

 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! 

 

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 !

Red Copper Camels

 In my occasional dabbling with 3D printed figures, I've had something of a mixed bag results-wise so far. 

There have been the "upscaled too far - but still cute" Etruscans, the "fairly fugly" medieval Knights and the "great but too brittle" Numidians.

Next up on this route march to the future are some Red Copper Arab camels - replacing some very old, and very grim Lancashire Games Mahdist camelry that I've had far, far too long. 

These Red Copper figures are really exceptional designs, with a huge amount of detail - the sheer amount of which only really becomes fully apparent when you start to try and paint them and begin to find extra straps, layers, details and bolt-on weaponry that you'd not really spotted in the unpainted prints. 

That did mean that my decision to go for a "layering" approach with the paint for the riders (with the camels themselves being done with GW Contrasts) ended up being rather more of a labour of love than I intended - some of these camels have at least 24 different paints applied to them ! 

Anyways, first up are some Light Camels and Generals, 2 to a base:

I've gone for a fairly muted palette on the robes of the riders, with whites and duns but then adding a splash of colour with the banners, sashes and headgear - and of course the rugs on which the riders all sit. 

If you look closely here you will see that every base has the pair of camels connected at some point - or not to put too fine a point on it I made sure to glue their buts together.

This was to make them more resilient, as the camels do have long, spindly legs and the risk of them snapping off seemed that it would be significant - gluing each pair of models together creates one "thing" with 8 legs not 4, in a fairly wide and stable stance that won't bend (and snap) when you pick it up carelessly and squeeze the two individual camels together in the process. 

There's about half a dozen poses in the set - no obvious "Commanders" as such, but more than enough to generate variety. 

All of the bases are MDF and magnabase with an added layer of steel base sandwiched between the two - this gives them a bit of extra heft which isn't just me being old school, it makes them easier to pick up   as they are that little bit heavier, and actually weigh about as much as you expect.

I'll drop some more photos of the main bunch of camels in a few days. 

15mm Arab Light Horsemen

 My 15mm Arab armies have been chugging along for many years, making do with some Lancashire Games Light Horse Javelinmen from their Sudan / Mahdist range. 

They have done sterling service but are not the best figures out there, and also suffer from rather spindly spears and swords, so I have finally decided to replace them with some Forged in Battle Arab cavalry. 

These are pretty straightforward figures, typical FiB which take contrast paints very well - especially on the horses - and have robust metal spears (aka arguably a bit too thick but they are very unlikely to break in action)

The pack of 12 (old sizes pre Dec 2025!) had a mix of 6 short spears, 3 commanders and 5 long spear riders plus 12 horses. These are the short spear guys.

And these are the "lancers" with a commander figure too.

I've done most of them with a simple paint job, using contrast paints on the horses, ArmyPainter Leather Speedpaint on the reins (as I find it both works and sort of self-blacklines too).

The white is a white base coat, a layer of Army Painter Holy White, and then normal white paint that leaves bits ofthe Holy White (aka grey wash) visible in places underneath that are folds in the cloth. 

All in all an upgrade on my old horsemen, and a simple but effective set of figures for tabletop use.

  

Byzantine Cavalry - the never ending army!

 I now seem to be almost there with collecting countless legions of Byzantine Cavalry to allow me to make up almost all of the Byzantine lists in ADLG - this time it's some "kite shielded" very late ones which I think of as being Nikephorian types, but which Forged in Battle seem to have decided are Thematics. 

The product code on their website for these chaps is a bit of a mix of WE-BT03 Middle Byzantine (Thematic) - Kavallarioi EHC bow which provides the archers and horses, and some lance-armed riders from the pack of WE-BT02 Middle Byzantine (Thematic) - Kavallarioi EHC (which look to be exactly the same riders as those in WE-BT04).

Mixing the two packs gives me cavalry units with both bows and lances, which matches their capabilities in the ADLG army lists.  

 Kite shields began appearing in Byzantine art and military texts around the mid-10th to mid-12th centuries, placing them very much in the Nikephorian period, and its those which give these chaps their distinctive look.

These are again using the LBMS shield transfers from Forged in Battle, which have also appeared on some of the Skoutatoi I painted up some time ago. 

Everything here is done with a white base coat, using GW Contrast paints for the brown and black horses, and Army Painter Speedpaint Holy White for the greys as well as a "2nd undercoat" for the one white horse too. 

I may use these as "medium" cavalry, and so I used Army Painter Hardened Leather Speedpaint on the shoulder and body armour that looks like it could be designed to be leather, although there is still quite  a lot of gunmetal - in this case Enchanted Steel Army Painter Speedpaint, which I am becoming a bit of a convert to as it doesn't need a base coat of black to work (unlike my more traditional drybrushed gunmetal approach).

The cavalrymen have base-specific colours on their tunics - this allows me in theory to mix them up across different commands and tell them apart, without being too intrusive or jarring. 

I am still somewhat puzzled by this shield transfer - it looks like it's missing a shield boss or something, but it is a specific transfer for this range and the shields don't have bosses, so perhaps its just a design that I don't quite understand!

The Army Painter Speedpaint Hardened Leather really pings when seen from the back - I also used it for the horses straps and reins, as it self-blacklines really effectively for minimal effort. 

 

The Suits are here to see you now !

 Mad as you like, and twice as dangerous, the Suit Wearers are the Military Orders of the Tlaxcalan army.

All of these figures are kind of dressed in the same suit - a bit like a crocodile onsie if I'm honest - but with a lot of bright contrast paints and drybrushing to pick out highlights I'm pretty pleased to have made them look as varied as they do. 

Doing red "lips" aorund each suits "mouth" was a bit of a faff, but very much worth it IMO.

There were just enough back banners in the army pack to add one to each unit of 6 men. 

Warriors in brightly dyes PJs' - who'dve thought it eh?