EIR War Elephants from Empire Models

I received these in the post today. I purchased them from Empire Models on April 23, 2009, which means they got from England to me in Canada in eight business days. That's impressive. And I had to build them, just because the miniatures are, likewise, impressive. These elephants are very reasonably priced at 12 quid each. They both come with two mahouts, one a handsome looking young fellow, long locks flowing in the wind, and the other a soldier that comes with a selection of 4 heads, which I took to be Seleucid, Bactrian, Antigonid and Ptolemaic. The trip across the Atlantic was not without incident for these resin models. The Indian Elephant Stomping had his stomping leg broken off, and the Indian Elephant Walking had a piece of the tower broken. Nevertheless it was the work of merely a few minutes to affix the parts again with superglue, which sort of thing is most def a part of our hobby. And the resin was good on both elephants with only one small pit on the underside of the Stomper. There were relatively significant mold lines on the mahouts, including on the head I used. This was not a major problem, but I have to say it was somewhat disagreeable. I used a gap filler to properly affix the head of the Indian Elephant Walking. This was because I abhor any manual filing or cutting of resin, my other option. Both elephants will require some greenstuff to make true the join of trunk and head, but I couldn't find my greenstuff this evening and it shall have to wait.

The elephants are excellent. I will be putting scuta around the towers on both, with LBMS transfers applied. I am going to use the top halves of a couple of Wargame Foundry Late Roman Cataphract figures that I will attach to an appropriate set of legs so as to crew both elephants with a Roman pikeman. I expect to put a legionary throwing a pilum in each tower as well.


When I first went looking for suitable elephants for my 28mm WAB EIR army, I checked into it on the WABList, a Yahoo Group I have been a (mostly lurking) member of for years. I received a number of posts in reply to my inquiry, one of which advised me to get the 1/72nd scale Zvezda War Elephants, which the poster stated were oversized for 1/72nd and suitable for God's scale. I did so. Below you will see one of the two elephants the Zvezda War Elephants box contains, with red painted on it by my 3 year old, which is certainly a good thing - if not the the best thing that I could say of this elephant.



I had an interesting time shopping last night. What happened was that my wife splurged at J.Crew last Sunday morning, so this opened the purse strings for yours truly. So yesterday I acquired the following:

Painting supplies:

2 Citadel TIN BITZ paints
2 GW Foundation Mechrite Red paints
2 GW Foundation Gretchin Green paints
2 GW Foundation Iyanden Darksun paints
1 Foundry PRUSSIAN BLUE PALETTE (3 paint set)
1 Privateer Press P3 Standard Studio Paint Brush

I have to have the Foundation paints as I undercoat with black and these paints just give complete coverage on one application. The PP brush has been a pleasant surprise, which is why I'm getting another. The Foundry paints are an experiment.

I also picked up a few miniatures:

2 blisters Foundry Late Roman Fully Armoured Cataphract Cavalry. These are for the EIR project and I need to kitbash a couple of pikemen for the elephants.

1 Reaper Dark Heaven Garnuk the Ogre
1 Reaper Dark Heaven Kagonk Ogre Chieftain
1 Reaper Dark Heaven Vourgha Ogre Warrior
I just love the big Bob Olley sculpts. Fantastic.

1 box Perry Miniatures Napoleonic British. Got to have them. I will be doing these up with the Victrix box towards the end of this year.

1 Newline Designs 25mm Ancient Galatian Warband of 24 Foot & 3 Mounted. These are for a 28mm 300 point Impetus army I'm devising.

I live in a town where there are only two products locally available for my hobby, being White Dwarf magazine and Delta Ceramcote paints. So shopping is a lot of fun for me.