Praetorians!

Making up for March's failure, I finished this regiment of 21 Praetorians in the last week.  One will go on the base with the Emperor.  Sixteen will be in the Cohort and four are extra.  I'm really pleased with how this unit came out.  They are my favorite so far in this army.

He's so bad ass he can't even be bothered to draw his sword.

This cohort is my sixth infantry unit for this army.  I now have Praetorians, Veterans, three units of Legionairies and one Cohort of Auxiliaries, all painted.  By the game on the 20th I'm hoping to have eight archers, six Numidian light horse and two command stands done as well.  I'd also love to get my new Barracks building and the movement trays done.  That totally seems feasible.  Or maybe not so much so.

The whole unit of sixteen.

The decals on these shields were especially painful as each one had to be cut in half, resulting in my having to apply 40 of them.  I'm getting better at it though, I only ruined one half and I didn't have to use super glue at all.

This Optio will be talking to the Emperor on his command base.

These are, again, Warlord Games models.  The box comes with twenty Praetorians and a mounted Emperor, who looks like Marcus Aurelias from Gladiator.  The Optio above is from the Auxiliary infantry set, and is one of my favorite models.  That box comes with four metal command, so I pulled him out to add another figure to the command base.  A guard would have been good too, but I'd already based them all.

Praetorian Command.

I decided to give this unit a blue and white crest.  I wanted a little bit more color and it broke up endless ranks of red and steel.

Quarter view so you can see the crest and the shield.

I'm also very pleased with how the Praetorian Legate came out.  He's got a white, Senate, cloak on instead of the red military cloak.  The purple edge is not very clean, but it will be fine at table top distance, which is what I paint for.

Rear view, showing the cloak and crest.

Rear quarter shot with a better view of the design on the cloak.

Front quarter shot.  This is a great model.  He shows the Praetorian/Senate arrogance brilliantly.

This set of models gets me closer to getting back on track for my goal of twenty models a month.  It also takes me a long way towards having my whole army painted for the game in two weeks.  I'm pleased both with the speed with which I got these done, and with the way they look.