In my quest to paint every single figure in my Indian army collection I put on my miner's helmet and grabbed a powerful torch and entered The Vault with the intention to gather together all of my elephants so that I could begin painting them. As in all things in Life, it wasn't as easy to do as it was to say. The sea of (often mislabeled) brown cardboard cartons cast up flotsam and jetsam that distracted me from my mission (how did I end up with four 1/72 Airfix HS-129s that aren't in my records?) but eventually I located the box marked "25mm Ancients". This forty-plus pound box was carefully maneuvered out of The Vault and deposited on the small gaming table. Opening one of these boxes is always an adventure as they belong to the Pre-Record-Keeping era so I'm never really sure what's inside. Internal organization consists of how many cards of minis I could cram in rather than any sort of organizing by period or nation, see below:
some of these date back to the mid 1970s,
I felt like Indiana Jones entering an ancient tomb
A diligent search through the contents of the box found nary an elephant (which is deeply disturbing as I am quite certain that I had at least three RAFM Indian elephants). I DID find all sorts of cool stuff that I spent way too much time looking at and sorting about. By the way, I located another ten cards of Indian cavalry during this rummage, so the painting list grows longer rather than shorter.
anybody remember these? they were the gold-standard in their time
Frustrated that I couldn't find my pack of pachyderms I re-entered The Vault and shifted several hundred-weight of boxes seeking the errant elephants to no avail! With my luck they will surface the day after I spend a minor fortune on replacements. Resigned to my fate I got out the box of "started" elephants that I have been studiously ignoring for four decades and sat them out on the table, a shabby lot they are! Few are actually properly painted (most being in the first stage of rattle-can priming).
yep, most of these are Britians Baby Elephants (I'm thrifty, or I used to be)
I will continue to plumb the depths of The Vault seeking my mislaid mammoths but in the meanwhile these troops have been transferred to the painting table.
this ought to keep me busy for a day or two
Watch this space for further developments.
Those "Greek Hoplites Crouching" on top of the pile would give you some nice Triarii to flesh out your Romans as they and the Velites are about the only unique troops to the earlier armies.
ReplyDeleteOh boy I do remember those yellow blister packs
ReplyDeleteYou must be long in the tooth, just like me, I'm painting some of them because the plastic bubble got so brittle that it crumbled
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