KGL 1st Light Dragoons

 

I managed to get the first of the light cavalry units finished off this week for my Anglo-allied army. These are British light dragoon figures from Newline Designs painted as the KGL 1st regiment.

I have one other pack of these in the lead pile at the moment, and it's tempting to paint them as the KGL 2nd regiment since both units saw action during the 100 Days campaign, but I may go with one of their British counterparts instead and add the other KGL unit at a later date.

Next up will be one or two artillery bases I think. That should give me enough to give the British their first proper run out on the table with a small game.

British 2nd Dragoons - Royal Scots Greys

 

I have a bit more spare time on my hands at the moment, so there's no excuse not to dig into the lead pile and add some more units to my British Napoleonic army. First up is the Scots Greys.

I've settled on 8-figure cavalry units these days, but may extend these out to 12 figures to match units that I painted earlier in the project. 12 figures (6 bases) do look great on the table, but 8 figures are fine and work well for games like Shadow of the Eagles and Neil Thomas' Napoleonic Wargaming.

These were good fun to paint - a solid couple of days' work, but worth the time put in. I didn't go for much variation on the horses, and held back from adding certain uniform details, but all in all I'm happy enough with how they turned out. The grey horses will certainly stand out nicely on the table.

A unit of light dragoons is next in the painting queue, and I'll see where my fancy takes me after that.

Newline Designs - Portuguese cavalry

A few weeks ago a parcel arrived for me quite unexpectedly. It turned out to be an early Christmas present in the form of some Portuguese cavalry and Spanish infantry, very kindly sent from Sean at Newline Designs. I'd asked Sean about the cavalry at the beginning of the year when I first had my eye on building up a British and allied army. At that time, Newline Designs didn't have any, but it so happened that they were already in the pipeline, along with various other Portuguese and Spanish units.

I remember reading a series of posts about 20mm Portuguese Cavalry over on the (highly enjoyable) 'Prometheus in Aspic' blog, dating back to 2011. At that time no-one made any in 20mm, so they had to be cobbled together using horses and riders from other nations. It'll be interesting to know if this new release from Newline is indeed the first dedicated Napoleonic Portuguese cavalry available for 20mm.

I decided to paint this unit as the 3rd regiment, based on this plate by Michael Chappell from the Blandford Colour series book on the Peninsular War. Looking at the plate again, I realise I may well have mistaken the sideburns on the figures for chinscales. Easy enough to fix it that is the case, but I will need to investigate further.

The 12 figures are mounted on 50x30mm bases, three figures per base, as per my plan for playing games of the new Lasalle rules once they're released. For games of Commands & Colors, I'll only need to use three bases (not sure yet how I'll go about distinguishing light cav from heavy cav).

My thanks go once again to Napflags for the flag. According to the info over on that site, Portuguese cavalry carried one flag per squadron, each of a different colour. I opted to give them the flag carried by the 1st squadron.

Next up will be the Spanish infantry. These are 'remodelled' figures, which I'm assuming means they are new sculpts to replace the old ones. I never owned any of the previous models, so I won't be able to make any comparisons, but the new infantry do certainly look very fine.

I have another week off work coming up, so should get most of that unit done before deciding what to focus on next. I'm hoping Sam Mustafa's new Lasalle rules will be available soon so that I can give them their first try out, pitting my French against my Prussians. I'll be putting together a battle report for that when I do.

A very happy New Year to everyone when it comes!

The Empress' Dragoons - done!

It took me a few days longer than expected to get this lot finished, but my goodness what a joy it is to see them all finished and based.

These are the Dragoons of the Imperial Guard - or Dragons de la Garde Impériale, to give them their proper (and very splendid) French name. Also known as the Empress' Dragoons, which is much less of a mouthful for us wargamers.

These were hugely enjoyable to paint. Figures are once again by Newline Designs. Lovely uniforms and they will look great on the tabletop I think. I'm really pleased to get this first unit of Imperial Guard cavalry added to my French army, and already looking forward to adding more Guard units, including infantry.

I'm going to focus on a bit of terrain building first, though, so I might not have any more painting additions for another couple of weeks. Still hoping to do a battle report of some sort (French vs Prussians, of course), but I'm still undecided about whether to do this on my hex terrain using Commands & Colors, or on my modular terrain tiles using another set of rules.

Either way, I'll hopefully have some more pics etc soon. :-)

Prussian landwehr (militia) cavalry - finished!

Although I haven't posted a huge amount of painting updates in the past few months, I am still chipping away at the lead pile, adding extra bases to existing units and generally rounding out certain parts of the Prussian and French armies (mostly Prussian though).

The most recent addition was another 6 figures to the Prussian landwehr cavalry, which takes the total to 18 figures and should be enough for most games/scenarios. I also decided to revert back to using two-figure bases (30x30mm) to give more flexibility. Rebasing wasn't as much of a chore as I'd feared. Soaking the MDF for about 24 hours softens it up nicely, and I only had a couple of minor repairs to do in the course of it.

I think I've mentioned this before, but I really do like the figure of the landwehr colonel (picture in the front rank next to the bugler). All in all, very nice minis once again from Newline Designs, with just the right amount of detail for my tastes.

Seeing as the camera is set up today, I'll take some more photos of the other units I've been working on, and upload these soon.

Next up will be to get started on those excellent buildings from Total Battle Miniatures you see in the background. They should look even better once they're painted up.

East Prussian Landwehr Cavalry

So, my first unit of Prussian landwehr cavalry is now finished. I have one other lot of 9 miniatures still to paint, which will probably be done in the not too distant future. As with the French chasseurs, I've gone with three figures on a 45x30mm base, which is also handy for making the most of the Newline Designs unit packs, which contain 9 figures.

Rather than painting another Silesian regiment, I decided to paint these guys as an East Prussian, so it was nice to paint some red collars etc rather than yellow. The central figure in the command stand is actually a landwehr colonel, which I bought separately from Newline and swapped in for one of the regular troopers to add a bit of variety.

I'm rather fond of the landwehr portion of my Prussian army. I think it's the uniforms that appeal to me. They're simple but look good once painted up, and a bit more colourful than the regular Prussian line infantry. Apart from the other pack of cavalry, I still have one more unit of foot and that'll be the landwehr finished for now. No doubt I'll want to add more in the future, but this will be enough for the time being.

Currently on the painting table is a base of Prussian reserve infantry, which I decided to do next in order to experiment with how a 6-figure base looks agains the 4- and 8-figure bases I've used so far. I'll post pics of these and the other completed reserve infantry units in the next post.

Bye for now!

Chasseurs á cheval

I got my first unit of French line chasseurs finished and based today. This will be the first of two units, both of which will be painted as the 16e. I've painted chasseurs á cheval before in 28mm (since sold) and in 10mm, and always enjoy doing them. These are probably my favourite of the cavalry figures from Newline Designs that I've painted so far. Really nice figures. I spent a bit longer on the horses than I normally do. Horses are not one of my strong points, but I'm slowly improving I think.

I used the Osprey Men-at-Arms book, Napoleon's Line Chasseurs as my main reference for the uniforms. The command figure in the centre is based on one of Angus McBride's excellent illustrations from this book, showing a subaltern from the 16th regiment.

I decided to start using a different approach to basing cavalry for my 20mm Napoleonics. Instead of two miniatures on a 30x30mm base I'm putting three miniatures on a 45x30mm base. So, same frontage per miniature, but it'll mean fewer bases per unit.

It's back to the Prussians for my next unit. I started work today on some landwehr cavalry, which should be quicker to do than these chasseurs. I have two packs to paint, and may do both together, but I'll see how it goes. I hope to post pictures of these soon.

I doubt this blog will be getting much traffic at the moment, after such a long hiatus, but if you do stumble across it then I hope you're enjoying the posts. It's likely I'll be staying focused on this current project for the rest of this year, so if you like 20mm Napoleonics then there should be more posts to interest you over the coming months.

Kallistra undead: skeleton cavalry and ballistae

I'm making good progress this week with my Kallistra Hordes & Heroes undead army. Here are some pics of the most recently finished units, the skeleton cavalry and ballistae. I've also finished the giant vultures and a unit of skeleton archers, but need to finishing the basing on them.

I also had time to play my first quick game of Hordes & Heroes - between my undead and barbarians. The barbarian pretty much rolled over the undead with ease, so it'll be interesting to see how future battles go between these two. I also realised that my armies are fairly small. Using all the models I have available only amounted to about 100 pts per side, so the game didn't take me long. It was good fun though, and I like the simplicity of the rules and the ease of movement using hexes instead of measurements. I think I'll start adding more units soon so I can fight some bigger battles.

Claymore 2014

Real life has been a bit busy these past couple of weeks, so not quite as much time to paint and blog, but I did recently finish this unit of horse riders for my 10/12mm barbarian army. I decided to base them with the short edge forwards so that I could also use them more easily for Warmaster if and when I get round to using it.

My hobby highlight of the past fortnight was definitely the trip to Claymore last weekend. I came away with my wallet scarily lighter and my backpack a lot heavier, but more importantly my enthusiasm for all things wargaming and miniature painting was well and truly stoked up. Amongst the various traders whose stands I visited, was Kallistra, where I bought some more of their Hordes & Heroes barbarians, as well as some skeletons for the new army I plan to start soon. I also picked up a couple of boxes of their Hexon terrain, which I really like, and will blog more about in future posts.

I'll show some of the rest of my lead haul from Claymore later, but for now here are a couple more pics of my barbarians for you to enjoy. I've been a bit inconsisten with my choice of basing materials for these, but hopefully the whole army will still visually hang together reasonably well.