A long overdue project... Well there's time now.

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Given I now have no commute, I can pretty much start work when I get up, finish early and have two more hours of the day for myself.  You have to take the positives where you can in the present climate.  Cooped up alone is not that unfamiliar, but a lack of external social opportunities is obviously not great.

Anyway, yesterday's project was a rebasing effort on a pair of my creaky old - but beloved - plastic ancients armies.  My Imperial Roman and Ancient British armies are a mixture of mostly 2025 year old models, and the present painting reflects that.  The old basing was if anything worse, being onto scrappy bits of card in threes and fours.  

They were stripped off the bases a year or so ago, and new bases were finally cut out of sheets of 3mm MDF a while after; but yesterday I finally bit the bullet of getting the piles arranged, repaired, and rebased.

Imperial Rome

The Romans are mostly Revell and Airfix, the latter needing most of their shields supergluing back on.  Thankfully, despite the near thirty year age of the Aifix figures, they do not appear to have any of the brittleness issues older models were notorious for.

The bases are 80x60mm, with the intention of each being a stand-alone unit.  For example a single infantry base for the Romans contains three ranks of five men with a designated officer model to the side.  This could represent a single Cohort, or half a Legion, subject to scale.  This basing is with a view to use in Kings of War Historical, but would work for Hail Caesar or other games.

Ancient Britons

The Celts are a mix of Airfix, HaT, Revell and Italieri.  Repairs were surprisingly few, but the chariots and scratch built light horse needed some work.  I had to resort to the brutality of a hot glue gun for some poor souls.  The large bases reduce individual risk to models, and also allow the warbands to look suitably disorderly.

The next stage is to get the base texture and colour sorted.  A lot of the models have old flock on the base, and the simplest solution looks to be the paint it light brown, if it falls off in the process it's no loss.  Sand will then be added to unify the whole.  After that it'll be touch ups of the worst paint damage - mostly spears, swords and helmets it seems - and then a shaded varnish to protect it all and finally give the models some contrast.

Which, in the present climate, may not take that long to get to...

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