Well for a while anyway. I have decided to just halt printing for a while as I really have a bucketful of crap to paint.
I decided to make a start, by doing a smidge on the Gallians’s
I was just thinking today on what I need to paint and the light bulb came on. Stop printing and get painting. I will need to print some more stuff for the Geek Club, but to be honest I am really going to try and burn through some of my backlog.
Off the top of my head I have the following :
36 Goblin infantry plus a dozen cavalry
30 odd 15mm samurai and Koreans
About six knights and associated foot
Two full Mordheim Gangs, Sisters of Sigmar and a human group.
All the Vietnam gear
All the ironclads
À table full of buildings
24 skeleton infantry and a dozen cavalry
Oh yeah and the Gladiators.
To be honest this is what I can think of straight off. I am 100% sure there is more… this is only the printed stuff… I am not even thinking about the metal miniatures!
I really, really must kickstart my arse into painting again. I have new paint and brushes… I have pretty things to paint so perhaps I need to put them all together.
I am now the proud owner of a school of dubious gladiators.
So from left to right we sort of have a dimachearus with his two swords, they are meant to be sicas but, I had gladius handy.
Next is a guy with an axe…. Errr there is no known reference to an axe wielding gladiator… there is a gladiator in the Galleria Borghese in Rome that is sometimes confusing as part of it is missing and a foot is behind a guy with a gladius… when you look at a picture it kind of does look a bit like an axe at first glance, in a poor light and the wish to see an axe!
An axe if you want to see one
Next up is a quasi hoplomacus with his spear and round shield.
Next up a thraex with his sica and parmulata (small shield). These shields were usually rectangular. The sica’s curved blade was designed to reach beyond a scutum and do damage to the shoulder of the opponent.
Next in the front is the murmillo. Outside of a retiarius this is probably the most iconic of the gladiators. Think gladiator and most people think of him. Generally he would fight the thraex and hoplomachus.
Front right is a bit of a sort of weird retiarius. I say weird as his trident isn’t as it has four prongs. I also stuck the arms on the wrong body so this one has ocrea (greaves) on his legs. This guy would generally fight the secutor. And not the murmillo as was originally thought. They did pair up and indeed in one bout a retiarius was purported to be on a raised platform with a pile or rocks. A ladder was at each end with a murmillo at the bottom. I cannot remember where this came from, so it definitely isn’t gospel.
At the back I made another sort of retiarius, with a spear this time. I cut the spear point off the original end and gave it a different look to the other one.
As for footwear, on the whole they didn’t wear any. Some confusion comes from the mosaics where leg wraps come down to the foot.
I am going to have a fiddle about and see what other types I can make. A laquerius should be easy enough spear and a lasso instead of a net and trident. A bestiarius or venatore should be easy enough to too. And as for a poor noxxi – some poor dude with just a sword, if he was lucky fighting one of the types above. I might be able to do an eques… all I need is a horse and an ancient rider. Add gladiator arms an helmet and voila!
So last night after having another failure I decided that enough was enough and that i Would relevel the bed. Good job I checked as although the front bolt was well and truly solid, thse side one was decidedly loose.
So I took out the resin, did a tank clean, which I had never done before and relevelled the plate. I gave some 40mm Gladiators another go. Yesterday I got two bodies and nothing else, today I got everything.
I am doing a reprint of the pair I printed the other day.
Today’s print on the left, yesterday’s on the right
Hopefully I will get everything printed on that one too. Everything seems to have printed properly.
Today i did battle with the rotten floorboards in the lounge… i won, but it was a close run thing… This is the joys of a 200 year old house that has no foundations and everything sits directly on the ground (the floor is about 6 inches above the soil). After feeling quite proud of myself, I found some more that need replacing… i must admit i did say the off naughty word, especially as I had just nailed the replacements down. if i had noticed earlier my life would have been easier as i could have used the spaces i had made to eaily remove the extra bits…
Tonight I printed off four gladiators for the kids in the Geek Club.
Now okay I am a bit of a Gladiator Geek and these representations are a bit odd. These were prebuilt by Wargames Atlantic. There is a bit of a swapsy going on here. As an example the Hoplimachus is using a scutum instead of a parmularii and he seems to have lost his helmet. But before I write a whole essay and bore the pants off everyone, I had better get back on topic. So as I mentioned in an earlier post, these miniatures are round about the same size as Perry miniatures. My Geek club is used to painting things that are a bit bigger. So I did an arbitrary 140% increase… these are now 40mm miniatures! Whoops.
This evening I was knackered… the poly myalgia does make me tired at times. So rather than lots of swearing as I was trying to paint anything. Instead I went for an easy win and stuck miniatures to bases.
My chap to be is in the front with the boat on the helmet. It originally had a sword in it… but I removed it. Sadly I removed the tail too. I managed to use an old Mordheim archer arm to repair the damaged print (second from left).
I will get these sprayed tomorrow and hopefully get on with the painting.
So this evening I set about adding the metallics to the knight and his pair of foot soldiers. I got a bit heavy handed on the gun metal so looked for anything I could to avoid wasting the paint. I found a box of various bits and found my armoured bear and a couple of goblins. Basically anything that needed a metallic colour got some.
I will hopefully carry on tomorrow and get the shading and highlights done on the armour.
This weekend I am embarking on a project I never though I was going to do…
I am super annoyed that a whole pile of my Contrast Paints have dried up. I maybe haven’t used them for three months and I am going to have to bin a lot.
I used to say I preferred the pots as you can shove your brush in and get the amount you need, but at £4.50 a pot I reckon I have nearly lost £50 worth of paint. Pretty miffed about it to be honest.
So watch this space and listen for my fell voice on the wind as I drop pots, knock over bottles etc.
Well the other day my good Blog Buddy Eric was asking me about resin printer failures. I am no expert, but hopefully talked enough sense to help him out…
Anyway I ran a print for the Ikko Ikki and lo and behold a failed print.
I managed to print the bodies, but as you can see there seems a distinct lack of Japanese heads and arms. The bowman is also missing an arm. Anyway I emptied the Vat and checked the FEP ( the plastic film on the bottom of the vat that the light ravels through). As I was doing this I noticed about half of the screws were loose. I tightened these and went for something I knew worked…basically this lot:
It pretty much worked okay apart from the helmet.
So I redid the Ikko … this time I did the supports and once again a failure. I got the bodies and only a few arms.
Now if you compare the two images above. The first one is darker… then the wheels in my brain started working. I decided to add a bit of flexible resin mixed in with the ordinary stuff I use.
And??? I hear you ask. Well flexibility can cause problems as the miniature can twist away from the supports ( well I think that is how it works). The bodies are thick enough to survive this… arms and heads are small enough to allow the flex. Notice the missing arm on the bowman is his bow arm. I printed twice and voila… two dudes without their left arm.
I pretty much used up the mix, I used an old bottle to store the remnants and am printing a new knight and entourage with my straight resin… I will find out tomorrow if it worked… I could check now, but it is raining and pitch black… so you will have to wait.
Bogenwald 