Getting ready for Salute...and three more Romans

Lucius Verus and friend.

I don't know why I am so excited about Salute this year.  Perhaps its due to the prospect of picking up my In Her Majesty's Name figures, although how I will explain such a lot of new metal to my wife is tricky.  However, I feel she should cut me some slack as she is prizing the tiles of the kitchen floor in readiness for a new one and we have a man coming to install our new cooker hood this afternoon, which was my Christmas present to her (she did ask for it).  It must be worth it to stop all of her moaning about my cooking staining the ceiling and filling the house with mould-inducing water vapour (according to her anyway).  She doesn't really cook (she went to Winkfield Place finishing school (as did Princess Diana) and that bit of the curriculum must have completely passed her by...she does arrange flowers nicely, though) and my cooking is often of the Italian variety which does, admittedly, seem to lead to a large circle of sauce around the pan and up the wall.  How a cooker hood is going to cure this I'm not sure.  I think she has visions of stray droplets being sucked heavenwards by this hideously expensive piece of German technology, which will have to contain the equivalent of an Me 262 engine to generate the expected suction.

I keep telling her that it is a kitchen and not an Ideal Home Exhibition display home.  Not that I have anything against the Ideal Home Exhibition (which also seems to be at ExCeL these days) as when I was small our holiday house in the South of France was paid for on the back of an Ideal Home Exhibition house my father designed.  Still, kitchens are supposed to get messy.  All in all, therefore, I am reasoning that given how much I am forking out for the kitchen she might ignore my Salute stash.

Anyway, a bit more progress on the Romans this weekend with the Praetorians all now based and undercoated..  All of the Caesarian plastics are assembled and based but I seem to have lost one of them.  I cannot think where he has gone at all but I have the new metal command so his absence won't be felt. 

This morning I finished my second Emperor for the 2nd Century force I am building, Lucius Verus.  Rather than an officer I have giving him a nice Syrian slave girl to accompany him.  Verus had fair hair, we know, but I resisted the urge to replicate the gold dust he used to sprinkle in his hair.  I have taken a less than historical approach to his armour and have dressed him up in a version of that worn by Richard Burton as Mark Anthony in Cleopatra.  The original was owned by Debbie Reynolds and it was put up for sale in 2011 with a  starting price of $20,000.   I wonder if anyone bought it?

Sadly, no one makes a figure that approximates the ne plus ultra of Roman cinematic costume as worn by Burton in the same film.  

I also painted the first figure for my Caesarian army, a veteran centurion.  This is a Copplestone-sculpted Foundry figure and he looks suitably stolid.

Thanks to Scott I also bought into the other Victorian steampunk range, Empire of the Dead and had to choose which figures I wanted for that this week.  Much to my surprise I have gone for some of the more vampire-like ones and so watched Van Helsing again this week for inspiration.  I really liked the completely inauthentic Transylvanian village in that film but reproducing that would be well beyond my modelling skills!  Still, it has got me thinking about an Eastern European rather than a Victorian London setting.  A few houses and some woods seems more achievable!

One thing I am going to try and get at Salute is some more CDs of Miniature Wargames so I can get rid of some of my bound copies off my shelves.  Space is everything at present!  I need to check which ones I have already got before I go, though!  I am wondering about picking up some of the Empress miniatures Jazz Age tribesmen too for Waziristan.   Other than that I don't have a big list this year.  Let's see what happens!