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Re Vera Romanorum

Or possibly rem parvam Romani…well these are what various translation apps told me…

So these really small Romans have built some really small buildings to go with their siege engines… first up a small border fort…

This was a failed print so it is embedded into the modelling compound. I had basically Cocked up the supports and orientation of the print. You can see the error on the right hand towers… the crenellations are missing.

Today I worked on the interior buildings.

I went for a commandants house and Principia (HQ) granaries, the hospital and barracks with the Centurion’s house on the end.

Left to right… barracks, Commandants house, Granary, HQ. Bottom left the tents and hospital in the middle

I also went for the tented version of the legionary tents and the HQ too.

Because I am a twit, I forgot to add a base to the tents 🙂

Some of these would work for villas too.

I took a quick shot of some of the buildings inside the fort

One of the larger buildings has got a bit of a gap on a corner. I don’t know whether it is a delamination or a gap in the original file. By gap I mean less than half a millimetre.

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Dinosaur Mug and More Heads

Today we had a family outing to ‘Aa Fired Up’ in Lerwick. This is a decorate your own pots and a plethora of other unbaked ceramics. We all chose a mug and after much humming and hawing I decided on a Dino themed one…. Here it is in all its glory… well raw glaze state.

The dinosaurs are stickers which were removed after taking this photo. I will see if I chose suitable colours in a couple of weeks. Gemma who owns the business is such a lovely person and I am glad her business is still going strong. We actually were her first ever booking for our eldest’s birthday when she first opened.

This evening I stuck heads on Vallejo bottles. These are as bright as the Army Painter Speedpaints. Once the Greenstuff has cured I will do the individual colours like last time.

Once again I reckon these will need the use of medium to thin them down to the Contrast consistency.

Today I started messing around building a fortification in 3D Builder. At the minute these are in separate bits. They are also a whole lot bigger because I forgot to add in my 2mm stunt auxiliary for scale. Poor sod keeps getting giant cubes metaphorically dropped on his head in the software. On the other hand he may be entrapped in a big green cube!

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More Teeny things

So I made some more siege bits and pieces for the 2mm armies. Shown here are a siege tower and a covered ram. I have also made some covered Siege tents for want of a better word. The Romans used them on the siege of Jerusalem. Basically they were like the ram, without the ram bit. It allowed the troops to get close to wall without some oik dropping a boulder on their head. I have made two types. One with just a roof and one with side screens too. These things had two layers of rawhide sandwiching seaweed.

The final image shows some of the barbarian forces that I snipped off the other day.

Next up… I had better build some walls for the equipment to breach 🙂

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Colourful Heads

Sooo I eventually got round to getting my paint toppers painted with the AP Speedpaints. They are definitely a lot different to contrast. They seem a lot thicker and although great colours aren’t really doing the highlight and shade the way Contrast does. This is not a criticism, I just need to work out how they work. I reckon there will be some thinning down with medium in my future….

When she came through my wife asked me why I was painting bottoms… I was looking at the front, she was looking at the back…

I now see what she means…

She thought they were grotesques mooning…

Out of interest the pure white one back left is the bottle of medium.

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Teeny Tiny Things Take 2

Well for some reason my SSD card decided to eat my files I made yesterday…after quite a bit of head scratching, puzzled mumbling and a lot of swearing I started again…

So we have a scorpion with and without crew on their little cart, a ballista, an onager, a four wheeled and two wheeled cart and some pack mules. I also did siege tower, but may have gone a bit over the top as it is taking forever to merge all the pieces together.

I have done test prints of all of the miniatures and they all printed fine. They do seem smaller than the other stuff, but it is probably just an optical illusion.

I also undercoated two Republican Legions, two Gallic forces and a Hoplite army too. Just got to paint the buggers now!

Second from the front on the left are the test prints of the things I made today.

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Teeny Tiny Things

So I decided to go down another rabbit hole. As you know I am going back into 2mm. I have printed out a whole load of units. Well today I started on the Imperial Romans… the one thing that was missing from the force were the artillery and transport.

Cue me starting to fiddle in 3D Builder ( I really, really need to learn how to use Blender properly). Anyway I eventually got to something I was happy with.

So we have pack mules, a four wheeled cart and a Scorpion cart with crew.

I used miniatures from project war gaming as my base.

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Teeny Tiny Troops

For some reason this evening I decided to get back into the 2mm miniatures.

Well actually I know the reason. I saw my three legions based up. And I thought, they look really nice. Two are imperial and one is from the Republic. At this size, you can only tell the difference because of the line it triarii at the back and vélites in the front.

The second reason is I had a right sod of a job getting them off the supports. for some reason tonight I managed to pretty much get the infantry force for my proposed Carthaginian army done. I would show you, but the photo is totally blurred. By time I noticed I put them away.

The empty box in the middle is now full to the top. Still a lot more to get off the supports. In the past I have painted on the sprues, but after so many problems I am going to go this approach and use Copydex. To stick them to cardboard strips and undercoat and paint that way.

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Ork Toppers

So I have got the toppers for the Xpress paints printed now. I am use free curing methods, apologies for the state of the woodwork

One day I may actually paint them.

As an addendum…this is where I got them from…https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-speed-paint-toppers-299625

The set is 40k themed, I simply chose two that could be fantasy.

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Gollum

Or possibly not…

years ago I was at a mates house and his dad loaned me his copy of the hobbit…yeah, that was nice of him, I hear you cry… interestingly it was a first edition of the hobbit and it is different to the later editions…

The one that always stuck out to me was that Gollum offers the ring to Bilbo if he wins the riddle game, which is sacrosanct to Gollum. He couldn’t find his ring and was extremely apologetic to Bilbo, Bilbo who had already found it and said nowt about it!”I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon. He kept on saying: ‘We are ssory; we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only pressent, if it won the competition.”

Oh and there was definitely no ‘we hates him forever!’

Funnily enough, not that I can remember, Tolkien failed to describe Gollum, and as such various illustrations appeared… now anyone who has seen the Peter Jackson films will forevermore see Gollum looking like this…

However Tove Jansson, a Swedish illustrator ( of ‘The Moomins’ fame) drew him like this…

Bilbo meets Gollum at the lake

So as you can see, there is a bit of a height difference… this discrepancy led Tolkien to do a bit of an edit in relation to the size of Gollum.

First Edition…”Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum — as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes.”

Later editions…“Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum—as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face.”

You probably already knew all of this, but it might be interesting if you didn’t… why bring this up now…well I heard on the radio yesterday that a charity shop had been given a first edition and the owner nearly binned it ad they thought it wouldn’t sell.

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Shrunken Heads

Well okay, maybe enlarged heads would be a better description…

After spending ages making my own naff bottle toppers, I found these free ones… the idea is to paint these in the colour in the bottle. This will show the true colour on a model. I have twenty four of these and another twenty four ork heads for my Vallejo Xpress colours.

These are fastened on with Greenstuff. I hope to get them painted tomorrow.