A few new arrivals

February and March have passed in something of a blur and the blog has been a little quiet. I came back from Cancon to discover we were acquiring a new dog. While this had been discussed, I was not expecting the arrival quite so soon. Nor was I expecting the hard work. A six week old rescue puppy, as gorgeous as she is, has required an awful lot of attention. Meet young Lottie.

It's been fifteen years since our last puppy and I'd forgotten how exhausting it can be, let alone for one that is really too young to have been separated from mother and litter. 

As I'm the only family member based at home all day, the burden has fallen on me, so my time hasn't really been my own for a few weeks. That said, a young puppy sleeps a lot and that's meant, with a bit of reworking of my hobby space, I've managed to paint a few things. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for playing games. Hopefully that will be rectified in the coming weeks as things settle down into a more regular routine. She's come a long way in only a couple of months.

At first, I decided to simply focus on a few small unfinished projects. The first were a final few groups of Romano-British that I had bought at Cancon. I wrote more about these just last month in this post.

Realising that painting armour and mail was relatively quick and straightforward, inspired me to come to grips with the outstanding Romans that I wanted to put together to oppose my Germanic tribes. 

For that I'd acquired enough Victrix sets to make up the force of legionaries, auxiliaries and archers that form one of the units for the early imperial Romans in the Infamy, Infamy rule book. I've made great progress here and will shortly be able to compile a post on the project with the completed figures.

While Infamy, Infamy has single figure casualty removal, I've decided to go with multi basing for these Romans, it's something I'm more inclined to do going forward for a couple of reasons. 

Firstly, in the past I've been basing my figures on 25mm rounds and for that I need a 60x60mm sabot base for four figures. That's a big footprint, especially if you compare that with multi basing on something like a 40x40mm. That's a substantial difference - from 3600mm square down to only 1600mm square. After a bit of trial I decided 40x40 was just too small and crowded, so in the end I've opted for 50x50mm, which allows for more space for each figure while maintaining a smaller footprint. 

Secondly, I've never been a fan of empty sabot slots and in the past I've gone to great lengths to create blank terrain bases to fill those slots. With multi basing I can avoid that altogether and maintain a more pleasing aesthetic. Yes, I do need to come up with a way to mark casualties, but I think there are solutions with less glaring visuals than empty sabot slots.

One much smaller project was eight Perry Miniatures plastic British colonial figures for the Second Anglo-Afghan War. These I had made up while doing the figures for the Sudan (which could work equally well for the Afghan War). 

However, I'd always wanted to paint a few as the 72nd Regiment of Foot in Afghanistan, after seeing this picture in one of the Osprey books.

I'd actually done this once before many, many years ago, when I converted a 54mm Airfix multipose US Marine figure.

Fortunately, the tartan is not overly complicated and reproducing it in an abstract way for a smaller scale was fairly straightforward.

Now, you might be asking, why the Second Anglo-Afghan War? Well, that's because another uncompleted project is putting together some of the Perry plastic Afghan tribesman. These were purchased a few years ago in a sudden rush of blood to the head when I was immersed in the Sudan project, but have since sat in the stash. My motivation was driven by a couple of things. One, my Sudan British could work just as well for the latter parts of the 19th century on the North west Frontier and Afghanistan. Two, I already have a collection of Afghan style buildings that I scratch built for modern games. 

The Perry plastic sets gave me an affordable and attractive entry point and so the new puppy can take some credit for resurrecting this particular project.

I have to say, I'm really impressed with the figures, I think they are some of the best Perry plastics I've worked on. The sculpting is terrific and that's matched by the myriad options for poses that can be created with the various combinations of bodies, arms and heads.

So, while it's been great to watch the collection grow and to see various projects come to fruition, I do need to start thinking seriously about getting these figures into action on the tabletop.