Back in the October issue of Wargames Illustrated I shared some pictures of the Republican Roman Legion I had painted for my Punic Wars Project. With the exception of one Agema Miniatures Tribune they were all sourced from Aventine Miniatures. After completing the Legion I turned first to the supporting cavalry arm. Never numerous in the army organisation of the period I represented the citizen cavalry by two bases of four figures each. I also added a single figure as a commander. The cavalry were mounted on 80mm x 40mm MDF bases from Warbases, while the command figure was mounted on a 40mm round MDF base from the same source. Again the figures were from Aventine Miniatures but I have to confess their multipart nature, two part bodies, separate heads and some arms, almost defeated my aged hands and eyes! No doubt better and younger modellers amongst our number would do much better than I did!
After completing the cavalry I wanted to work on something which was a little more suited to my mediocre talents as a modeller and painter, so I next tackled several bases of lightly armed skirmish figures including Balearic slingers, archers and javelin armed levy. My reasoning in choosing these for the next stage was that they could happily be deployed by both my Republican Romans and by my Carthaginian army, when I got around to them!
Once again I sourced my figures from Aventine Miniatures. I have found their figure ranges very painter friendly and needing very minimal cleaning up before spray undercoating, mostly just smoothing out casting runs from beneath the bases and the odd small intrusion behind sword scabbards, the latter possibly the result of wear in the production moulds. The service from Aventine has also proved to be first class, with immediate order confirmation by email followed by a progress email and finally a message when the order has been posted. Other, bigger companies might take note here! For the above bases of skirmishers I chose quite muted colour schemes, at least for the archers and slingers. For the javelin armed levy I chose to use mostly whites rather than the same red scheme as for the Roman Legio VI, reasoning that they could be added to the bases of velites if the need arose in a game without spoiling the overall look of the army. With the completion of these elements my initial orders were all painted.