Parthian heavies 1

Onto Parthians, a great opponent to Impie Romans.  These heavies go 4 to a base and are entirely armoured. Two unusual techniques seem called for. You can see the first here, after riders are posted on (drill, wire post) and the base varnish is done: dry-brushing as a full coat of paint.

First, dark water soluble stain/varnish - I use Cabot's rich teak but have used other varieties over the years. If you buy light, you have the option of mixing an acrylic in. For example I can mix black in, end result, flexible black undercoat. You can see the straight undercoat on each base in the photo. It is semi opaque, letting the natural cream of the plastic be seen.

Next, I mix a silver-gold colour to represent bright-polished brass and iron. Then, using a large (sz4) Filbert brush, I dry-brush armour, not worrying about over-paint. Then I use Army Painter strong tone to give that depth, since the minis lack much themselves.

Colour gets added as normal after that, and at this stage all I've done is dark grey on mounts.

The second unusual technique will be adding terrain to each base prior to basing.

II/8 Bruttian, Lucanian, Campanian Punic era Italians complete!

What a long project this has been. But at last the Romans and Carthaginians can take their pick of allies, leaving me still enough to field some sort of Italiate army.

This army morphs for II/8b Campanian or II/8a Bruttian (without Hd). In its favoured Campanian mode it is:

CvGen, Cv, 4x4Sp, 4x3Ax, 2xPs.


In its less favoured Bruttian/Lucanian mode it is:

CvGen, 5x4Ax, 4x3Ax, 2xPs.

Obvious expansions are the virtually unarmored Apulians, the hefty, possibly 12x4Ax Samnites, later Etruscans (with Hellenistic style hoplites) and Syracusans.

But for now I'm heading away from the Punic era!

Second Cv element for Italians

This element will go with Campanians (II/8b).
Progress has been incredibly slow, even for me. But most of the foot are near done so I expect a cascade of 'done' over the next week or so.

Italian skirmishers complete

These are the final Ps elements, looking good!

Italian javelin-armed skirmishes - the head-swap

This shows stage 1 of my 2Ps x 2 build. The HaT originals (left) are fine, save that the helmet is unsuitable. So I grabbed four Spanish slingers, whicked their heads off, and painstakingly drilled pinned and glued. The greystuff collar was rolled around each pin, because I knew I would not have a good fit.  

Finished conversion - Italian hoplites

Yay! Looking good.

4th element 4Sp

Ok, changed my mind, nothing new there! I switched from standing-at-rest hoplites, the mild conversion planned, to a more ambitious one.
The original mini, foreground, shows how converted minis have had a dynamic tweak. Heads turned quarter (just a hot water tweak) and left arm separated from body, notched, and flexed a little again using hot water. The spears are added using hot glue, to top of hand. Clumsy I know. I got most of the shields on with hot glue but one stubbornly resisted so I laboriously pinned and glued that one.