More Late Romans: Ballistarii (conversions involved!)

Hi guys,

Some time ago I wanted to include in my late Roman army a unit of ballistarii, or crossbows... As far as I know, there are not specific miniatures for the "rare" late Roman crossbows, so I needed some conversion work... How? well, I took 4 Psiloi of "Crusader Miniatures" Byzantine range, and substituted their heads them with Roman/Arthurian heads from "West Wind"... and voilà, sort of a Roman ballistarii.

I used as reference some Late Roman illustrations from several books (Osprey, Concord, etc...)

Now the miniatures, they are based for Impetus (well, Basic Impetus), but perfectly suitable for other games like Hail Caesar or any other flexible game that uses multibased miniatures (so not SAGA).

And now, just a test model for another simple conversion that I will cover in another post: Late Roman "Funditores" or slingers. I use Gripping Beast  plastics to convert these, very simple, and painted in a "fast" way.

Cheers!!

Warhammer Empire pistoliers

Hello fellow painters,

I have managed to finish another full unit, the famous Empire pistoliers,  that fast cavalry in the renaissance German "reiter" style. In Spain, Games Workshop brand them as "Herreruelos" a type of soldier of XVI c. very similar to these Fantasy style "reiter".  I love the sculpts by the Perry brothers, with a lot of historical feel and available a lot of years in the Warhammer catalog, until their plastic substitutes came out.

The plastic horses are not bad, but horses are (for me) tedious to paint, with a ton of thin layers in the horse flesh in order to achieve a smooth finish... I am a lazy horse painter!

the riders were easy to paint, mostly blackened armour highlighted in grey, with edge highlight in silver, the red trousers and white and blue feathers give some colour to this unit.

There are some small conversions here and there, for instance, the flag bearer is a common pistolier with a hand swap, he lost his pistol and had instead a plastic knight hand with a lance, and the flag is an original 90' White Dwarf pistolier flag!! with the colours of Middenheim.   The "leader" has a plastic head from the 6th edition foot soldier command sprue.

I hope you like this little update of my Empire Army, and soon I hope to update the blog with some late antiquity miniatures!

Some close ups:

Cheers.

A little Mordheim update

Hi guys,

Today, I present you a very quick update of my Mordheim Reiklander warband, the good old metal youngblood!

This miniature is full of little details, like most Mordheim minis, I think it was sculpted by the Perrys (that was the GW norm in the late 90'). There were two models of Reiklander youngbloods, I own both, but I like this one more than the other miniature (armed with two hand weapons, sword and knife) and given his "uniform" I definitely will use him in my free company/militia unit in Warhammer Fantasy.

The paints were mostly Foundry and Vallejo, with GW "Rakarth flesh" for the off white shirt, mixed with some white. I like how this model turned out, and wanted to share it with you guys.

I hope you like it!

Cheers