Imperial Roman Auxiliaries

Just when I start making progress with one period of history and decide that I must work on commanders and only commanders...I find another project really interesting!

Here we have Imperial Roman Auxiliaries from the Wargames Foundry range.  These were sculpted by the Perry's probably over 20 years ago now and I think they are still some of the best available.

I bought these second hand many years ago but never quite got around to giving them a complete re-paint and re-base.  Well finally I have.  Because I have a unit already with green shields I decided to make these grey. Actually I put the grey on as a base as I was going to make the shields white and then keep the edging around the laurel leaf decals.  I thought I had run out of the decals so was determined to be really careful.  In the end I really liked the grey so kept that and kept a tickle of the original green around the yellow decal to accentuate it.  Amusingly I also found a big bag of the decals just after I finished painting the unit!

The dull basing bit and an explanation about 'the gap'

I traditionally based my figures singly for Warhammer Ancient Battles and for this I liked 24 man units in 2 ranks of 12 .  The problem I now have is that I like deeper units for Romans- they weren't the thin red line after all - so 3 ranks gives a good solid look to them without them being as deep as a warband (usually 4 ranks deep).  Suddenly this leaves me 3 men short for 3 complete ranks.  I could get round this by basing them in 4's and 8's instead of 3's and 6's.  But a stand 4 men wide tends to look too wide for march columns for my liking. 3 wide looks just right (as above)...so I think I will be buying an extra 3 men for each of my cohorts to fill that gap which just irks me!

On the close ups the green edging can be seen around the yellow decals just giving an interesting accentuation of the detail. It seems to work for me.

I have decided that if I can get away with having eyes hidden by shadow then I'll do that. Life is too short and I have too many other projects that I want to do. I started a whole new period of history last month...The Zulu War...more to follow!