Athenian Hoplites ~450 BC

This is the latest miniature work: it took a few weeks but I am satisfied by the results. This Athenian army has been sitting in the closet for way too long (several years!), it was overdue for some work. The army is at the moment 24 bases, of which 12 Spears, 2 Cv, 2 Aux, 8 Ps, in DBA codes. It provides several options too. I plan to expand this to cover a full Field of Glory or Might of Arms army.

The hoplites, in battle order

The figures are mostly Chariot, with some other I cannot positively identify, Essex perhaps. They were good figures, perhaps a bit static on the poses, these days you can find more variations, but in any case it was well worth the effort.

I used cheap Anita colors, plus Vallejo and some Citadel. The gold/bronze is Formula P3 which I would recommend over all the others at this point. The challenging part in painting these minis was outlining the white leather armor with thin black lines (I’ll add pictures some other time). I thought of showing the full glory to the front and the shields.

The shield designs are transfers from Little Big Men Studios, which I would greatly recommend. They are a bit fiddly to put on at first, but once you get the heck of it, they are easy to handle (tip: do not forget to remove the transparent film in front of them, as explained in the instructions – yes, I did a couple of time).

All in all a nice army: can’t wait to test their worth in battle!

Roman DBA Army ready for battle

After a long time (about a year), I finally completed my Early Imperial Roman DBA army! It took so long since I did these figures in small bursts with long inertia pauses, that were entirely my fault. I have been busy with work and with my other “hobby” (learning to fly airplanes) so I did not put into this little project enough effort.

All in all, the total effort can be summarized to be 4 weeks of 1 hr per day effort, more than you would usually want to put into a DBA army (reccomended 1 week to 10 days). However Romans, and EIR at that, have always been my favourite (I was born near Rome, you know), so I felt I had to put an extra effort into them.

The figures are from Corvus Belli, 15mm EIR and they are gorgeous. For completeness I must say that, unfortunately, the package came with very “flashy” figures, so I had to do a lot of clean up before painting. I figured out why after a short inquiry to Corvus Belli itself: since EIR is their top selling DBA army, the molds are getting a bit old and therefore there is extra flash in the figure. The figures however are fully worth the price and effort, so I armed myself with a sharp hobby knife and went on patiently removing the extra bits.

I primed them with Krylon White Primer, mounted them on wooden sticks and did the painstacking painting. I opted for legionaries in red tunics, since there is no clear evidence either supporting the red or the white tunic thesis (red looks better and more hollywoodish). I personally think that white tunic was the most common, since the lifetime of a tunic was small anyway (few weeks apparently, especially on campaign) and the likelyhood of finding a red tunic in some border shop must have been chancy at best.

At first I thought about using decals for the shields, but it is not so easy to find decals of the right size (although Little Big Men Studios released recently a line for Corvus Belli EIR). The decals available were not varied enough, in my opinion, so I decided to take the full weight of the frontal assault and painted them out with the brush. In the end it was easier than I thought: the symmetry of the Roman patterns helped me. I used a very good spotter brush (don’t try to save money on brushes) and the right mix of Vallejo, Anita (cheap), and Reaper colors.

I painted the full box set, including all the options and also made a small fort for camp base. The fort is probably sub-standard for the Roman Army engineers, but from the time being will do. The results are shown below.

Follow the eagle!

Numidians protect the right flank

Roman Cavalry of the XII Legion

A couple of shots from MCON X

Howdy, just to get started, here is a couple of pictures from Milleniumcon X, in Round Rock, TX.

The games were fun and I have lots of pictures which will be (slowly) posted.

The picture above is from a fun game I had, hosted by Lloyd, from the battle of Platea which resulted in a crushing Greek victory, historically as well as in the game. I had the Athenians on the left flank; this is a picture of the Lacedaemonians (aka Spartans) on the right wing which, “enraged” at the Athenians success on the other flank, are going to prove their worth against the Immortals (no less)!

This one above is a picture of my Gladiators, fighting in the arena for the amusement of the local Governor and his mistress. The Gladiators were painted with the help of Brian Cantwell and the (portable, folding) Arena is an amazing work of engineering by Alex Hazlett.

More pictures to come!

Hello world!

This is my blog on miniature gaming and everything related in College Station!

I always loved war-gaming and modeling military miniatures, so here it is, my blog on the same subject. Some of my friends with which I used to play have been scattered around the world and started their own blogs. This is a nice way to stay in touch, so finally I started my own.

I also hope that this blog will attract enough attention from other players in my area, Bryan/College Station, TX. If you are looking for somebody with which to exchange ideas and play miniatures, send me a message!

I will also post in this blog pictures of events, miniatures and modeling techniques as I go along.

Cheers!