Republican Romans.... more painting and some green stuffing

Official Project #1

Nothing much other than a break from the paints and an excuse to blog off with a few photo's, helps with momentum...

The new plan was to finish off the triari this week and they were duly separated into two groups muscle cuirass and the plate style armour, but as is more often the case than not things went pear shaped. Simply put I spent waaaay too long painting one night, wandered off from the paint bench with the balance of the little beggars in a sleep deprived daze and now cant find them anywhere!  As they can not be located plans changed, instead I decided to work on some more of the command figures and the velites. 

The only problem, if you can call it that, with this ancients lark is painting the much larger areas of flesh, much more than I would normally find on 18th-19thC figures. Spending the time on arms and legs in the style I would normally paint faces alone was getting time consuming and a little annoying. I think I have found a fast and simple solution for painting flesh that will pass muster and relies on blocking in solid colour followed by some simple wash and glazing, nothing earth shattering there I know but it something different for me.

I'm trying to keep the flesh darker than I normally would to reflect a Southern Mediterranean peoples and of course they are soldiers that spend most of their time out of doors and see plenty of sun. I also mucked around with some muted colour for the tunics to break up the off white tones that I will be using for the bulk of the army, maybe some edge borders will give a sense of slight irregularity to the outfits as well.

My last trick for this week was to do a bit of conversion work or as I called it "green stuffing about", once again this was simply to add some variety and I'll admit I have been pretty keen to give it a go for some time. So, sucking it up like a good little princess I mixed up my green stuff, took a deep breath and with some tiny idea of what I wanted to do slapped that stuff right on there, it obviously not totally convincing but it was a reasonable start. Now that the first conversion is out of the way, and nothing cataclysmic befell Paintpig Towers in the process, I'll be looking for an opportunity to have another crack at green stuffing.

I will definitely need to plan the next conversion a little better, sketch out what I want to do, and make sure it is clear in my head. I will also need to modify my tools a little although on the surface they look right I found that in reality they are for the most part too big, you really do need some tiny shapers, itsy bitsy tiny! The clasp on the cloak for instance started as a ball of green stuff about the same diametre as a pin head and I had nothing that neatly fitted into the folds on the back of the cloak to smooth it out properly, lessons learnt the hard way are lessons well learnt and not soon forgotten.