Hobby Update: Militia Troops

As I mentioned in the last post, my hobbying has been all over the place this year. I am still trying to claw my way back on top of my various projects and get them documented. Here’s a step in that direction, though I intended to have this up weeks ago...

The Militia have been in process for many months now. They were essentially all painted up mid-November. I am quite happy to call these guys ready for the table.

This is everyone, in a somewhat disorganized pic. I think you can get the feel for the unit without pics of every troop.

The models are a mix of leftover Romans from Warlord Games and some Fireforge Games Men-at-Arms. I wanted the unit to have a kind of “hastily-levied” look emphasized by an assortment of armor and weapons. The Regnum is pressing anything they can get into filling these “chaff” units. The mix of models seem to accomplish this visual goal well enough. The shields tie the troops together as a unit despite the various weapons and outfits. The shields also tie the Militia to the rest of my army with the purple and white coloring.

Basing these guys was a pain though. I again used some Vallejo paste, and tried out two main avenues of application:

• Glue the model to the base and then pasting around it.
• Paste the stands of the model, then glue it to the base.

In both approaches, I painted the paste once everything was set. Unfortunately, I wasn’t disciplined in my approaches, and this mostly ended up a big bad mess, exemplified in the example below.

You can totally tell where the stands of these models are... bad basing. Fortunately, it got fixed!

It took another layer of paste (and more painting), but these are looking better. I still need to nail down a surefire technique for basing these models with stands… I still have a ton of infantry (100+ models) waiting in the wings for the Regnum. In the future, I think I’ll do a more tedious approach:

• Paste the models individually.
• Glue two models at a time to the base.
• Add paste only between the models.
• Repeat until finished.
• Paint the sand.

It’ll be a lot of back and forth, but this approach should give each unit a good flush foundation to be glued to the base, and make applying the paste between models as easy as it can be. I struggled a bit to navigate between all the legs with the paste. We’ll see how future units go I suppose.

While they could probably use a touchup here or there, I’m calling the Militia done and ready for action. I had a few prospective games fall apart on me recently, but I am hopeful these guys will see the table soon!