No pictures yet, but I thought I'd describe how my Romans are going.
After getting in my bases from Litko, I decided to go ahead and rank up four models and finish one of them so that I could do a test painting. After thinking about it a bit, I decided to go with the shield attached, which worked out OK. Shields are the one thing I usually tend to leave off when painting because they simply make things a lot more difficult to paint when attached, but because their placement is so important in getting these models to line up correctly, I felt I needed to try painting them attached.
Unfortunately, there are a few things that are going to slow down the painting time on these models. The flesh color and the red of the shield requires multiple coats of paint to get to a decent coverage. Also, the soft details I described earlier make my standard wash technique less effective. The detail simply isn't sharp enough to be defined by the wash. The main result of this is that the face needs a little more detail work after the wash in order to look OK. It's not a big deal, but when we're talking about over 130 models it's going to add up. Still, I think these guys should end up looking pretty good as a unit
The following are the paints I used (edited to reflect changes made since original post):
primer: Krylon flat black
skin base: Citadel Foundation Tallarn Flesh
skin top: Citadel Dwarf Flesh
clothing and shield base: Citadel Foundation Mechrite Red
clothing and shield front top: Vallejo Model Color 947 Red
armor, pilum tips, dagger scabbard, sword and dagger pommels: Vallejo Game Color 53 Chainmail Silver (will probably replace with Citadel Chainmail for supply reasons).
helmet: Vallejo Game Color 56 Golorious Gold (may also replace this with Citadel equivalent).
belt, sandals: Citadel Foundation Khemri Brown
pilum shaft, sword scabbard: Citadel Foundation Calthan Brown
helmet plume base: Citadel Foundation Iyanden Darksun
helmet plume top: Vallejo Model Color 915 Deep Yellow
wash: Citadel Wash Devlan Mud
Leadership
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I went on a walk with my son yesterday. He's on the last stages of his
Eagle Scout rank requirements and he's been roped into a leadership
position. This...
1 week ago
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I sent you a PDF from the manufacturer's website that shows how they painted their models.
That's a pretty good guide.
One thing I found as soon as I started researching color schemes is that we really don't know a lot for sure about the Roman uniform in terms of color. Everything is based on sculptures, a few cloth fragments and the occasional comment in one of the histories.
It's no even 100% that late republican Romans wore red tunics. There's apparently some evidence that they more commonly wore white tunics. The color of the standard horsehair tufts on the helmets is also a subject of debate, although I've now seen more than one source say that current research believes they were yellow in color.
Shield markings are another subject. We think that they painted designs on the shield, but we don't' know for sure how well they maintained those markings in the field, or whether they let them fade and only touched them up during the winter months or for parade. For ease of painting I'm simply leaving mine plain red, although the Wargames Factory guide is probably more accurate.
One final note, most color references for the late republican Legions show silver helms, not gold like the Wargames Factory guide, but I haven't seen anything in terms of a written description. I chose to stick with silver partly to cut down on the number of colors, and partly because it is the most commonly shown color in the references I've seen.
I'll have to try to list some of those references in a future post.
Looking through some of my sources more, I see that the bronze helmet was far more common during the late republic, with iron helmets making more of an appearance in the imperial era, so I'll probably experiment with the color of the helmet as I go forward.
I started assembling the free German sprues that came with the order. Heads are a little tricky to make them look correct. Some of the poses result in the heads staring at the ground so you have some weird angles on the neck. Sculpts are really good compared to the V1 Romans which I haven't started yet.
I've been working on more of the Romans. I'll be posting an update soon.
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