One of the pre-Covid projects that I was in the early stages of, was my foray into 3rd Century AD Romans and their enemies. A part of that was a "quick" build Sassanid army using older vintage, 2nd hand figures that were at least part-painted and mostly unloved. Click here
A great find as a part of this scheme was an Ebay lot with 6 Sassanid elephants (old versions of the Irregualr Miniatures model.) They were not horribly painted, so I reckoned with a small amout of work and rebasing the elephant arm of the army would be ready to rock. My excitement was thoroughly quenched once the parcel arrived. The combination of Royal Mail's tender mercies and inadequate packing had left the models comprehensively destroyed. 😞
The seller, to his credit, offered a discount with no quibbles but the prospect of a rebuild put these right on the backburner for me. A year later I stumbled upon the box of ellie-bits and started the process of cleaning joints and regluing the models. Luckily I had carefully packed the bits away with all the parts and crew of each beast separately bagged up. I lie. The first puzzle was to collect together the correct parts for each model before the rebuild. The crews at least had a general colour theme that made identifying each crew less of a headache than it might have been.
A couple of months and many superglued fingers later they are back in one piece and I have done some upgrades to tart them up a bit.
A bit of brighter colour was added to plumes and decoration on the elephants themselves and missing paint reapplied. The main upgrade (in line with lots of banners being added to the cavalry) was to make the plain cloth (housing? saddle-cloth?) on each model a lot more decorative. This was acheived with some painted on patterns but mainly with decals. The transfers were a combination of LBMS banners chopped up to fit and my own patterns printed out on decal paper.
I am quite pleased with how these turned out. It was a bit of a chamllenge to get the transfers to conform to all the moulded on creases modelled in the cloth but with application of Microsol and the requisite amount of swearing, we got there in the end. The designs on the cloth and all the shields draw the eye and distract from the fact that the 6 models are identical. Which is appropriately for this project very "Old Skool."
