The First Painted Legion of 2015

2015 has got off to a good start!

Happy New Year everyone. Welcome back, and it's good to see you again. I hope you had a fine holiday, full of fun, festivities, and food. :)

The last half of 2014 didn't see me do a lot of painting, and I joined the 6 month mountain reduction painting challenge in an effort to work myself a bit harder. Well, as you may know, life got in the way, and I even cut down on the wargaming I was doing.

But all that's behind me now, and 2015 looks far brighter--not just because it's sunny on the other side of the windows.

Over the last few days I have completed several 1/72 plastic Romans, so thought I'd post a step-by-step photos. They're very simple flat colour paint jobs and coated with Army Painter Quickshade (breathe) Dark Tone. Yeah, it's a mouthful, but it's great stuff. Lacquer and shade all in one. Unfortunately it's gloss, but I figure I'll either buy a dullcote spray, or just not care. Possibly leaning toward the latter. :) They do look pretty good on the table at arm length--far better than the Warmaster Undead did, but those were smaller and had less variety in their colour scheme.

The Romans look pretty good.

So without further ado, here's stage one: undercoating. I know, stop the presses. It only gets more exciting from here.

Then I did the skin colour. I always do that first because that's the messiest and the bit that usually is on the smallest parts. So I do those first and can then take care of the overflow when doing the surrounding areas.

Following that, I painted the clothes and the shields red.

After that I do the weaponry, boots, quivers, and shields. The patterns on the shields were different for the two brands of models--these figures are a mix of Italeri and Airfix. The Italeri are much higher quality sculpts and moulds, and their shield designs are far nicer. Unfortunately, the majority of the figures I have are Airfix. But they were all free, so haven't got any complaints. Both have embossed shield designs, so are straightforward to paint.

I was trying to get them done quickly, so the brushwork is very sloppy. I make no apologies. :)

And the final touch was the Quickshade. Here are the different models, bowmen, swordsmen, and spearmen separately.

Still to be done are to base them properly, and more than likely 4 to a stand. The bases here are just thin card, so I'm not sure if I'm going to put them on thick plasticard or MDF. Budget will probably dictate plasticard.

All in all, I'm happy with the overall look. They were cheap figures that were quick to paint, and they helped me achieve two goals: 1) they got me painting; 2) they got me finishing a lot of figures.

Pretty happy with that. I have a bunch more of the Airfix troops, plus a couple of chariots, and whole lot of weird orange plastic figures that look kinda like Romans but have odd shields. So got those to keep me busy, plus here's a sneak peak of some 1/72 Greeks, mounted on popsicle sticks ready to be painted.