When it comes to modelling, I have the attention span of a ferret: plenty of projects started (in various scales), few finished... And now I've got a new plan!

Johnny Shumate's artwork in issue II.6 is wonderful as usual and helped by the strict guidance of author Christian Koepfer, it provides a fairly unusual image of soldiers of the Roman imperial army. Already having Soldiers' Roman 3rd century legionary (SR-40) lying around, gave me an instant fix for the inspiration Johnny's image conjured up (this is how modelling projects often start for me). Hopefully doing a Step-by-step blog will give me the discipline to see it through.

Parts and assembly

I detest cleaning parts for assembly, so I was delighted that flash was absolutely minimal. The man himself consists of one large casting with his legs, upper body and right arm, his head, his left arm and the right wrist area with left hand. I glued the right wrist, head, scabbard (should probably not have done that yet...) to the body and let it dry overnight. The next day, I burnished the mail with the wire brush attachment on my Dremel tool to make it all nice and shiny. Next, I painted the mail with thinned Vallejo black glaze to add relief to the nice sculpt. I went over the creases with some extra black glaze when the first layer had dried. Highlights were added by drybrushing with a mixture of Vallejo silver and natural steel. When the mail was dry, I primed the rest of the figure with Citadel grey foundation paint. No particular reason for using Citadel, but it makes for a nice thin primer.

Starting on skin areas tomorrow. Hope that works out, cause if I'm happy with the face, that's the best possible motivation to finish the model. His pose is already really cool though, so I'm quite confident!