Romans everywhere!

Workbench today

I meant to sit down and have a good go at my Romans this weekend but for some reason I didn't feel like painting, despite the nice, bright weather.  Mostly, this is because when I have new figures it seems such a long journey before they are anything like ready that I give up before I start.  I knew that however much I did this weekend they would be nowhere close to being finished so, oddly I didn't start them until late this afternoon.

The other problem is, of course, that I had meant to start a unit of 2nd Century AD Romans but then with the arrival of my Legio II Augusta shield transfers for my Warlord plastic EIR figures I wanted to get them done and then this week I bought a box of Warlord's Caesarian plastics too.  So instead of twenty four figures to start work on I had over seventy.  Most off putting! 

In the end I did base the whole Praetorian Aventine Cohort and the rest of them should be ready for undercoating tomorrow.  I even started to paint four of them.  I only have four EIR's under way but am now working on a dozen of the Caesarian plastics.  Well, they are not all plastics as I ordered the metal command set direct from Warlord which arrived the next day, along with some LBMS shield transfers.  Taking a little longer to arrive was my second Aventine order of shield transfers for the Praetorians plus a command set and 16 auxiliary archers.  So I have no excuse to delay now.

One thing I did agonise over for a while was what colour to undercoat them. I usually use white undercoat but the Romans, of course, have quite a lot of metal on them which would suggest a black undercoat.  However, I don't really like black undercoat as I find it difficult to see what I am painting and given that I use enamels and not acrylics they don't cover so well over black.  As I am painting my Romans with white tunics I decided to stick to white undercoat.  This does mean that I will have to paint the metal parts with black which adds extra work.  Still, it's better than the three or four coats of white it takes to cover a black undercoat though.

Finally, I found a Copplestone sculpted Foundry Casarian centurion which I had painted a long time ago.  He needs tidying up (he was never properly finished -I had to rush him for the Fishbourne game) so will get him done in order to give me a nice acheivable target for this week.