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! 

28mm Victrix Numidian Infantry

 With a mostly-Foundry Republican/Camillan Roman army at the head of the painting queue right now I've already done the Velites and next up I have made a start on, erm, not the actual "Romans" but instead a small Numidian allied force made up from Victrix figures.   

This is the Allied contingent's Commander on a 40mm round base. I used two of the crew from the Victrix elephant set (more of that later..), drilling and pinning a leg each to the base (as these crew don't have puddle bases) and adding arms from the infantry sprues. 

All of these figures were done with a white undercoat, Warlord Holy White "Contrast" paints on the clothing then layered with actual Vallejo white on top of that.

These are the actual infantrymen - the skin tone is done with a couple of layers of Contrast Darkoath Flesh, with some having an extra layer of ArmyPainter Dark Tone wash on top.  

The round shields all have LBMS transfers of animal skins, whereas the scutum-type shields are hand painted (as you can no doubt see), partly to save money and partly because I felt the LBMS scutum ones were actually a bit too intense in design and colour.

  

One thing to check with the Victrix / LBMS shields and transfers is that the round shields seemingly come in 3 different (OK, slightly different) sizes, and so it probably makes sense to keep the smaller shields for the cavalrymen and any Light Foot javelin skirmishers. 

The three types of round shield are very, very similar in size so if you don't realise they are different sizes it's easy to only discover this when they are glued and basecoat painted ready to take the transfers!

I kept a fairly dull dusty pallete for these, mixing up some tan and beige colour for the shields in particular on my wet pallette and doing blending and shadows on the edges of the shields with a think coat of Contrast  Aggaros Dunes or other brownish colours.

As usual, a bit of drybrushing really picks out the hair 

I did start to wonder if the Holy White "new formula" Speedpaint was still bleeding a little into the white paint I layered on top (as this wasa big issue with the initial batch) but if it is, it's actually just about perfect for creating more subtle layering than a flat grey would have been. 

The aforementioned Light Foot skirmishers, with possibly overly large shields. 

Again using the wet pallette to do some mixing of various browns and tans I think managed to do a fairly credible job of blending in the edges of the LBMS transfers up to to, and in some cases just around the actual edges of the shields.   

This is a bit of a faff, but is really worth the effort IMO as you are paying good money for a great product from LBMS, but if you leave it so you can see the edges of the design and the plastic film on the shield it's sort of all wasted IMO

And, from "ground level", here are the guys ready to hurl javelins or attack with swords! 

More to come soon!

28mm Velites

 I've got a Foundry early Roman army in the lead pile at the moment, but in the interests of getting rid of some left over sprues of the mostly-Victrix Hellenistics I decided to repurpose some of the Victrix skirmishers as Velites - as after all, it's just some dudes with a javelin in a skirt, right? 

And here they are - the vanguard of a 28mm Roman army! 

I have a suspicion these shields are from some Dark Age viking types that have languished in the plastic bits box for a while. They may stay transfer-free as well.

The white tuunics are a base coat of white, then Warlord Holy White, then normal paint white  highlights 

I picked a variety of heads, some bear headed, some with generic Hellenistic/Roman heads

With a few more bases of Light Infantry I already have, this should be enough of a screen for the  armoured Legions of Rome!

Yet more Xyston Persians - this time some cavalry

 As part of the same purchase as the Xyston Persin Bowmen, I also picked up some PSC rubbery Persian cavalry. 

I'd actually not checked the packdetails properly, and thought they were a mixed set but it turns out there were half a dozen armoured cavalry and half a dozen unarmoured horse archer types. I already have a couple of units of the armoured cavalry which I use as the Satrapal Guard, so - so instead of cooking up two different formations I intermingled the riders a little to make a rather more random mix of shooting and spear-using figures in different levels of armour. 

As usual with Contrasts, they have come out pretty brightly - even if my painting on these has been somewhat sloppier than for some recent projects given that they will appear infrequently as part of an all-cavalry Persian army composition. 

I have a lot of these units already from Xyston, and so I wanted this lot to have a colour palette that will allow me to differentiate them from the others so they can be used as part of a coherent command. This led to these guys having a lot of oranges, reds and yellows in the mix without being "uniformed" in any way. 

 For a bit of a bish bash bosh job I'm actually quite pleased with how they have turned out.