Casualty Counter, and a Greek Horseman

Not much to report, been away for a few days break, so not much time to mess around with paint n figures.
Worked out how to do my casualty markers, saw the idea on another forum somewhere, and here is my attempt

The dice can be moved around to record the number of hits taken by the unit. This one is for my Tarantine cavalry unit, the figure is from A&A, with the addition of a Crusader Oscan head.

















Also got the first of the Greek cavalry unit finished off, just another four to add, and thats another unit to add to the growing force!!

Once again, he's an Aventine miniature, hopefully the finished unit will look the part.

Today I Have been Mostly Painting.....................Elephants

Managed to get the crew sorted on the second elephant, and a bit more work done on the supporting infantry figures.
The army itself is slowwwwwwwwwwwly creeping towards completion, in its Basic Impetus format, I'm now collecting more figures, to build it up to a Full Impetus army.

Only the Cretan archers, Greek Cavalry,Guard Cavalry and the man himself to do now!!  May be finished by Christmas :-)

Plastic........................Fantastic?

A while back, Doug Powell gave me a sprue from his box of Victrix Miniatures Later Greek Hoplites. I have finally got around to sticking one of them together, just to see how they would compare with my Aventine stuff.
To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised with how they turned out!!
Right. here's a quick review, and we start the ball rolling, with a few sprue pics! Now I have no idea how many different sprues there are in the box, nor how the figures go together, so this could be interesting!

You appear to get eight bodies on each sprue, a selection of different arms, eight heads and some seperate helmet crests, the spears and shields, a couple of shield aprons, plus some scabbarded swords. I think that certain arms will go with certain bodies, but without any instructions, I can't be certain.

They are nice clean looking models, and have some lovely detail. Some reviews are saying that the models are inaccurate, well they look like Hoplites to me, and to be frank, thats good enough.

I cut off a selection of bits, and made up a figure. There was a certain amount of clean up required, as always with plastics, you will get mould lines, and where the bits are cut from the sprue trees. A bit of work with a sharp knife, and some files, and we were ready for some glue action.
I used my good old Humbrol Liquid Poly, and the plastic responded well, with all the parts welding nicely together.

Here he is, the finished product, with an Aventine Italiote Hoplite, and to my amazement, they actually look just fine together!!
Would I use them in the same unit? Probably not, but I would certainly recommend the Victrix models.

So, the pros and cons of using the plastics: Well, they are relatively cheap, you get 48 figures in a box, and if you shop around, you can pick up a box for £20. The models are very well detailed, and they go together nicely too. They fit in Ok with the more popular metal ranges, but I would not use them together.
One box will get you 4 bases for Impetus, with 12 figures on each base.



Being plastic, there is more work involved, you have to have a level of modelling skill to put them together. Plastic, by its very nature, is fragile, and breakages will happen.
All in all though, I can't really find fault with the figures, and will invest in a box or two, when I get around to building my Syracusan army.

Back Again - With Some Italian allies

Yes I know, I was going to just have the one blog!!
Somehow, I managed to get a small amount of enthsiasm together, and finished off one of the unit bases for my Impetus Pyrrhic army!!

An Italian allies base, they could be Samnites, or Bruttians, or any of the various tribes that went over to the side of Pyrrhus.

Bit of a labour of love, as the figures used were not great. They are mostly Crusader Miniatures, and they were a pain to paint. I had to replace all the shields, with A&A Miniatures ones, as the Crusader shields have no suitable transfer sheets from LBMS, and I did not fancy attempting freehand designs. The figures came with seperate heads, a novel idea, but more farting about to get them right. General detail is a bit sof tand very plain,  none of them have a side arm of any description too.

The command figure is from Aventine, he's really a Roman officer, but I quite like the figure, and he could have pinched the kit off a dead Roman.

I await the arrival of the new Aventine models for the Samnites, as they will hopefully be, bloody excellent, then i may feel a bit more inspired to add another couple of unit bases.

Next, I hope to finish off the elephants, and Greek Cavalry

Back Again

Ok
Radical rethink time!!  I have decided to keep two blogs going for a while. I now have a different approach I'm messing about with, more later.

BLOG MERGER

I have decided to merge my two blogging efforts into one mighty blog!!

if you want to continue following the feeble efforts involved, in getting this project finished, slip on over to

http://nigelh-viewfromtheduckpond.blogspot.co.uk/


and join the party over there

cheers faithful followers :-]]]