Last Roman Saga
Recommendations: 558
About the Project
A friend of mine has meant to get into Saga for sometime. He felt that the 4 points boxes from Gripping Beast were too tempting to pass up. He added to this with some bits on eBay and I offered to kitbash up a Hearthguard unit from some spare Saga kits I have. After building his list and building his minis the project began to falter... So I offered to paint some of his collection for him. Unsure whether I will paint everything or not.
Related Game: SAGA
Related Company: Gripping Beast
Related Genre: Historical
This Project is Active
The scheme for the archers
I like this flat helm's for archers and slingers. I will maybe take some of their tunics closer to grey and beige. 
I will play with the colours of the cuffs, trim and decoration over the shoulder, but keep the circles the same.
The circles seem to have intricate embroidery, but for me a simple cross and dots is achievable. It's something that can be revisited easily if Tim wants it taken to the next level at a later date. There might be small eagle transfers out there that might do the trick.
To differentiate the different materials I just used different contrast browns so they look different to the original brown primer.Archers
I couldn't work out what the circles and over shoulder details on the models were. Turns out they were just decoration. The example shows squares but others show circles.
The brown with a white zenith seemed like a fast way to paint these up.Hearthguard - divide and concur
I decided to grab two of the Hearthguard built by Tim and to separate out the kitbashed circular shield guys to make a unit. I found more cloaks and added those to fully bond the unit together.
Then I used the same shield design and the same paint theme to gel this unit together with the remaining oval shield guys.
The lists
Got my delivery of Romans.I failed to give my friend guidance on what to build to make a Saga ready list.
Now I can see the bits up close I will paint the minis in batches that make sense unit wise.
The first idea looks like this:
1 warlord on foot
1 warlord on horseback
4 Hearthguard Cavalry
12 archers
4 Hearthguard on foot – sword and board
4 Hearthguard on foot – (kitbash painted already)
4 Hearthguard on foot – spear and shield
8 warriors – shield and spear
(With four similar minis on standby with extra spears to convert the warriors into a levy javalin unit if preferred.)
A standard bearer (can’t recall how these work in game or whether they get assigned to a unit.)
The Hearthguard paint job
The freehand on the shields were something I was desperate to do. 
The green is quite bold but I used Athonian Camoshade to try and make it less so.
The models were primed black, a zenith of brown applied from the cloak side / shield side. This made it easier to paint the Flesh tearer Red cloaks and the white background of the shields. The cloaks got a highlight of Mephiston Red.
The shields were based on some of the Little Big Man transfers I looked up online. The Christian "P" icon is a Late Roman symbol that gets a lot of use in wargaming.My kitbash project
I started off with some Wargames Factory chainmail bodies. I used the Wargames Factory arms as well because of the chainmail on the shoulders.
I chose to use cloaks from Wargames Atlantic Dark Age Irish sprues. The shields are perhaps from Conquest or from Wargames Factory (not sure). The swords are from Wargames Factory. Perhaps a little underweight compared to some swords around in my collection.
Then I realised that I didn't need to limit myself to bare heads just because I didn't have Late Roman options. In the Gripping Beast generic Dark Age Cavalry box I found some Romanesque helms and some oval shields. 
I knew that with two pairs of quite different builds that the paint job and shield design would need to be used to tie them together.The army
There were some eBay additional bits and my mate Tim built everything, his first dalliance away from GW products. 
Built around a foundation of a Gripping Beast 4 point box.
