Cohort Command

Quick update. Finished both of the two sets of command figures that I have for Legionary Cohorts(except for their shields). However, I only have a photo of one of the command sets. I have also gotten some Praetorians and I have begun putting them together. I have maybe enough figures for a Cohort, but I currently have to figure out what I am going to do for the shield design.

Additionally I have a few pictures of one of my Optios (Cohort Second in command). There will be one Optio for each Cohort and I currently have five others painted but no Shields as of yet.

As a side note I have also finally figured out how to properly put water slide transfers on. Took a little bit of research. I will have to try and figure out how to fix the figures I did a few years ago however.

Some parting thoughts. I have to laugh a bit, as it has been a long time since I have painted 28mm figures like this. The biggest shock was the switch from painting metal and then to plastic 28mm figures. If you are not ready for the change over, the weight difference between metal and plastic figures makes it feel as though you are painting air. Which is a weird feeling. The other thing I am beginning to look at is a way to make painting 28mm Napoleonics enjoyable again. I have a ton of unfinished 28mm figures and the variety of plastic 28mm figures has increased quite a bit since I last looked at them. No firm plans at the moment, just day dreaming.

Legion Command

As promised more Romans. These four figures make up an infantry command stand for one of the Legions I am working on. They represent the central command of the Legion and are based around the Legion symbol, the Eagle.

I have decided to start with the 10th Legion. The base color for this legion will be Red. And I plan on changing the color scheme each of the legions that I make. Once again the base is temporary as I have not made an order for new bases from Likto as of yet. I am still waiting for Warlord Games to ship the last order I made. So bases will not be ordered until later this month.

The observant watcher will note that I have once again changed how I paint flesh. I like the new look. It is not as fleshy pink as the Romans I painted previous to these figures, which is a good thing.

Romans? What did they ever do for us?

Anyone reading this right now is probably thinking to themselves "Romans? I thought we were going to see Gundams in the next post". Well that was the plan. And as soon as I feel like taking a bunch of pictures I will oblige and smother the blog in Gundam model kits.

Here is the real question that you should be asking yourself. Why did I start this project back up? As anyone who has been following this blog will note, I at one point shelved a bunch of projects in favor of working on some of my 6mm projects. The answer is as follows. When I first started this project I did not have a good focus on what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do what little I was working on at the time. And now I am pretty sure I have the kinks worked out. The biggest problem was the base sizes for the figures. The standard 40mmx40mm sizes were not working because of the need for extra depth on each base. I tried to use 50mmx50mm bases, but the extra width from those bases made the figures look too spread out. Solution get a different size base and with the help of Likto this can be done.

Second reason for doing this, it is my Dad's fault. Over the break I was able to spend a lot of time talking with my Dad. In these discussions we cover the Earth about eight or nine times. This year we hit on the subject of the Imperial Roman army several times and that started this little revival. When I got back to my apartment and started looking through what projects I could work. I realized that I wanted to be able to paint figures on the scale of detail that I had done for my Dad's Christmas gift. Combine the two and you get a revamped Imperial Roman Army project.



The good news is that I think that I will be able to use all of the figures I have worked on previously. They will just need to be removed from their bases and given a good was to give them the right look.

The other plus side is that I have a pretty good sized chunk of the figures I want to work with. This means that I will not have to sink a lot cash into the project to get started. I plan on making Cohorts sized at 24 figures to a Cohort on 3 bases. That means I am looking at bases sized at 50mmx80mm. I will probably try to make 2 or 3 legions with some other units thrown into the mix.  The bad news is that 95% of these figures are at my parents house.

In the mean time I have bought a few figures to give me something to work on and here are some of the results so far.

This is a Roman general. And as you can see he is heavily based on the movie Gladiator. I probably will not permanently base him on the base you see him on. That is there mostly for the purpose of keeping the figure was toppling over as he is a little top heavy.

That is it for now. expect more in the future.

The Fellowship of the Ring

At the beginning of last year I began a little side project to create for my Dad a little diorama. My Dad is a big fan of the Fellowship of the Ring movie and of the first Hobbit movie. I would have liked to paint all of the 13 dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf since the Hobbit movie had just come out at the time. However getting hold of some good figures of all of the characters from Games Workshop would have been really pricey and probably  would have taken more time than I had to do the project. As such I chose to go with the Finecast Fellowship of the Ring set. I also ended up purchasing the terrain set that GW provides for their Lord of the Rings line.

Each one of these figures is a resin miniature and were thankfully designed in such a way that each figure was one piece. This was a really nice feature as sometimes dealing with multi-part metal or resin miniatures is a royal pain. I will also give GW a lot of credit on the formula that is used for the resin in their miniatures. This resin has a really good blend of stiffness and flexibility, although I did push this to the max at one point and caused myself a bit of consternation.

In painting these figures this was the first time I had ever worked in the realm of the Lord of the Rings universe. I have been a HUGE long time fan of the universe as it is laid out in the books and I think that visually Peter Jackson and GW have done an excellent job of bringing Tolkien's vision into the real world. My praise for Peter Jackson stops there. I would go on a rant/tangent about what I think has been horribly screwed up and has made subsequent additions to the theatrical franchise a total and utter money seeking farce. But that is a post for anther day. Back on topic starting right now.  Since this was my first time painting these particular characters I spent a bit of time looking for pictures of the cast in their garb as they are represented by the miniatures. I even spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get certain looks from the paints I had on hand. The experiences I have gained from my other projects really came to the for in this project. I am by no means a pro competition grade painter. I am also not a 3 year old with hand paints either. Hear are the results.

Legolas

Aragorn

Boromir

Gimli

Gandalf

Pippin

Merry

Frodo

Sam

I still have some work to do. I have never done elves before and trying to get their fair and non-human look down right is a bit tricky. I also still need to work on the eyes of my miniatures. These ones are a far cry from the anime style bug eyes I had when I first started. But sometimes they come off wrong.

The display case was purchased from Squadron.com and is basically a converted vehicle display case. I did a little bit of terrain stuff, but I wanted to keep it fairly simple as the whole purpose of this was to show case the Fellowship. Not go crazy with the terrain. I also decided to do something rather radical for me at least. I went ahead and combined two different flock types to get what I consider to be a better color grass. Also the entire base is painted. I did not do any highlighting or dry brushing as the color of the terrain material that I used was grey and I did not go super heavy with the brown paint. I think the result gave me a decent look.

Final result. I think it I did a rather good job. Will I do this again in the future? Yes. This was a lot of fun to do. I have begun to find a lot of enjoyment in doing one off miniatures, as in spending a lot of time with a single miniature or a group of them as seen in my Sons of the Emperor project(Update on that soon). Not going full bore nuts like some of the competition people do. But being able to put more than a couple of hours into each figure and trying out different paint schemes. The added bonus is that since this was a gift I do not feel like I have purchased miniatures for no purpose other than to satisfy my vanity. There are a ton of miniatures out there that I would like to paint. But finding reasons to validate purchasing miniatures that will not be part of one of my bigger projects is difficult. Will there lots of updates on them? No. This was done as a gift for my Dad and as he watches my Blog I have no intention in giving away information on surprise gifts. Will there be more of these coming along each year. Due to other projects, that thing called college, and that thing called life I believe that I will only be doing one of these a year. I already have a head full of ideas on what to do next. It is just a matter of money and time at this point. Also some of the projects take a little bit of thinking to figure out how to do it right.

Worst feeling ever

So I have come to the conclusion that the worst feeling a hobbyist can ever have is as follows. I am currently at work wanting to paint some miniatures. IF that was not bad enough, the miniatures that I want to paint are 77 miles away at my parents house. Smooth move. Real smooth. Chances of going to my parents house between now and March.... wait for it..... wait for it...... ZERO PERCENT!  This would happen just when I got back to my apartment.