Monday, 14 March 2022

AHPC XII: From Mike W - 28mm Ancient Britons

 This post is a journey back in time to AD 43 / AD 56 and all that ancient malarkey! The figures are Warlord Games Ancient British, which have been kicking around my loft for a good few years now.

Completed Ancient Briton Warband

You will see in another post what my plans were for some of these figures but many of these remaining figures could only really be used as Ancient Britons, due to their distinctive armour. I added in some additional figures to make up their numbers to a viable warband.

The guys in armour

My aim was to put together a small warband that could be used in an SPQR game to oppose a Roman force that I previous painted a couple of years ago (I believe!).

These little guys are very dynamically posed, with a 'ball & socket' joint at the waist to allow for a multitude of different positions. I took the opportunity to take advantage of that and produced quite a lively warband.

And the unarmoured guys

As with most figures - I gave them a white undercoat (using Halfords Acrylic Paint Spray) this dried quickly and my first stop was to paint in the flesh.

Next up was a variety of muted greens & brown colours for their clothes before adding in appropriate wood, leather & metalwork. To give them a British feel, I then added chequered and stripe effects to the clothes and blue 'woad' paint to some of the exposed flesh.

My attempt at adding 'woad' tattoos / war paint to the guys with a lot of exposed flesh

Once dry I used a variety of suitable coloured inks to add shading, I then highlighted with base colours again - where appropriate.

Shields were completed with the pre-printed sticky back sheets supplied with the kit, this was the fiddliest part of the project as each shield pattern has to be cut out using scissors. That said they do look pretty effective.

An old and tattered sheet of Warlord Games Shield designs - on sticky backed paper.

Each figure was then coated with Matt varnish, with an extra coat applied over the shield designs to help them stay in place before being based in my usual manner.