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Miniaturistic Stuff |
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Newline 28mm Seleucid
War elephant In the tower I chose to use the pikeman and the archer from the Newline
kit, and I decided to use a 1st Corps Thorakites as the javelinman. They are roughly
compatible in size. I could only fit three crewmen in this tower, some sources say
as many as four could fit in a tower. |
First
off I needed to backtrack a bit:
I noticed that I had left off the rear end strap that is not molded onto the model.
So, before moving forward, I cut some strips out my handy stash of wine bottle lead
sheet and glued them on (with CA glue of course). This just took a couple minutes,
then I repainted the area.
This is a little trick I do with elephants and chariots. I raised up each foot with
a piece of plastic sheet. These "shims" will make it easier to do the
basing later. Make sure they are well glued on, because this model is heavy, well
over a pound of metal. It fell off off the base once because of its great weight.
Because of that I use 5 minute epoxy for this kind of stuff and I cross hatch score
the bottoms of the feet and the plastic shims before gluing.
Here is the base, cut out of
plastic card. It has to be thick enough, I prefer 1.5 mm thick or 2 mm. This is 2
mm. The dimensions are 55mm x 80mm to suit this model. (In Warhammer Ancients
there is not currently a precise size, and this is better than the silly 40mm that some
insist on). I have glued it to magnetic sheeting so the model will stick in transit,
either in the toolbox, or on a tray. The base was spray painted with some Krylon
Forest Green Camouflage spray paint.
I used the Five Minute epoxy to glue the elephant to the base. When that dried, I applied some Lightweight Spackling I got at ACE hardware to fill in the base around the feet and make a bit of a texture. As you can kind of see, the "shims" allow me to push the spackle right up to the feet without them appearing to sink in.
The Lightweight Spackle is the bomb, not only is it light weight, but it dries so very fast out here in low humidity. About a half hour and it ready to paint (but I gave it an hour). Here I used some Ceramcoat "Autumn Brown" as a wash. It just floods into everywhere and is the bottom layer for all the dry bits.
The first dry bits are some ballast pebbles from my pie tins of sprinkly stuff. I just thin white glue with water, about 3 parts white glue to one part water and flow it where I want stuff to stick with an old brush that is about to retire. The pebbles are just sprinkled on over my pie tin, where the excess collects for next time. I have a few pie tins stacked up in a file cabinent with different textures and colors. One tin has sand color, one read, one has what I call "basing trail mix" which has static grass and other green bits mixed in. I'm not one for doing elaborate base work for my basic figures, so often the trail mix is good enough on its own. Some larger pebbles were added with white glue. These eventually were given a few taps of gray paint to tone them back and make them look more in scale.
Finished finally:
A few more passses of trail mix and touch-up and the figure is finished. I glued in the crew with normal CA glue. Sometimes I pin them so they may be removed. In this case I glued them, so I will need casualty caps or something to mark their loss. The bowstring was from melted sprue from some plastic models. Melted sprue is a cheap and easy way to make strings that last. My Cretan archers have moslty kept their sprue bowstrings for twenty years of gaming, others with wire or string eventually break off.
The end result is an impressive model that looks like an Indian beast of some moderate size. Now this can take over for my Old Glory armored beast as the lead elephant, if another is needed then I can add the Old Glory one to the game!
http://ancientbattles.com/elephants/OGElephantJJonas.jpg
I hope this was helpful!
That's it for part Three.
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Back to:
Part One: The parts. Reference. Priming and prep work.
Part Two: Painting the beastie.
Part Three: The crew and basing.