Alexander and his Successors are the the inspiration for my latest project. After conducting an inventory of my miniatures, and succumbing to a too good to pass us deal, I find myself with over 1000 unpainted 1/72 plastic miniatures and a couple of hundred painted in the same scale all dealing with Macedon and its successor states. I decided to tackle this accumulation head on with the following objectives:
- Paint the unpainted
- Convert the abundant spares to units more useful
- Replace wherever possible the plastic spears with wire ones
- Upgrade old decals made out of true type fonts with more eye catching ones
- Rebase the already painted miniatures to 60mm wide bases used in Mortem et Gloriam
- Base the new additions to the same standard.
The fun aspect of this project is that I will be using lots of different techniques to accomplish the above. It is not just sitting and painting endless figures. I will be fashioning my own wire spears, printing my own decals, refinishing some existing painted figures and doing more details on the the bases than a simple flocking.
Today marks the end of week one. I started with washing the new purchases in the dishwasher and gathering together the already primed or painted minis.
The existing miniatures were individually based on either 20x20mm or 25x50mm bases for Warhammer Ancients. With Mortem et Gloriam I had the choice of either basing them like 15mm figures on 40mm wide bases or going to the 25mm scale on 60mm wide. After playing with position I opted to go for the larger scale to provide more room for the cavalry and more opportunity for terraining. Bases are from Litko, https://litko.net/ and are all 60mm wide and 30, 40 or 60mm deep depending on the troop type.
The shield decals I am using are various images I find on the web and modified in Paint and printed out in a Word document. You can see my previous blog entry for more details. Below is a sample of what I am using.
The wire spears are inspired by a Youtube video I ran across. The key was to use florist wire instead of the stronger piano wire used in more commercial products. It is a bit more bendy but given the number I will be needing and the current costs it is a trade off well worth it.
So far progress is good. I am starting to look at the possible conversions I will need and will detail those in a future blog entry.
And yes my spears have already tasted blood…..