Tagged: napoleon
Double Birthday Special
Well I’ve turned 29 today – almost but not quite the end of my life yet – and just like last year I thought I’d put up a much overdue blog update. I’ve lately been working on more Prussian and Arab commissioned units, and I’ve done so simultaneously with the former being handled at work during breaks and the latter at home. Not really the best way of finishing models quickly, granted, but the end result is what counts.
More of the plastics from Warlord Games.
These Prussians are the first half of the third battalion for my friend Henk. I’ll be glad to be rid of these plastics as the paintjob is becoming stale quickly. Thankfully I’ve finally received some artillery to mix things up.
Turcoman cavalry from Gripping Beast.
Then there’s more of those colourful Arabs. Here I basecoated the horses AP fur brown and the riders white, which helped with sticking to the project’s washing techniques without running into trouble with the horses’ deep brown coat.
These models will be rebased onto oval-shaped mdf bases which I’ll be receiving later.
I’ll be painting up an Arab warlord on a horse and one on a camel next for this army, and then some heavy Seljuk cavalry. Except for basing this mounted wing should be done by mid-March. Huzzah!
Up next: more Late Romans! At our gaming convention in Ghent on 14 March (Warcon) we’ll be recreating the battle of Chalôns, and my paltry number of painted units is entirely insufficient to withstand the Huns. I’m working on the general as I write these words, and I might crank out a unit of bowmen as well if time permits. More on that later – my mother’s finished cooking my favourite dish – steak tartare with fries and salad – and my stomach rumbles like the Persian drums at Gaugamela. Until next time!
More Landwehr
Phew, these guys took me a while to complete! More Landwehr for my friend Henk who’ll be using them sometime in June this year…
All models by Warlord Games
I painted them in two batches; the second batch are the front rank. They were handled identically to the first battalion I painted.
Only the officer is different from the other command section.
The musician’s drum wasn’t finished at the time of taking the pictures, but it’s been corrected. I’m handing these over next Thursday, and maybe I’ll be doing some artillery next – a change of pace I’ll certainly welcome.
I’ll continue tomorrow with another update, this time a Hanomag with a PaK 36. Until then!
Dominique Jean Larrey and his Flying Ambulance
My wonderful girlfriend Eva treated me to some lovely stocking-fillers last Christmas, mainly Napoleonic in theme, and after completing the Belle Alliance I continued on my Napoleonic vibe by painting up Baron Larrey and the ambulance. Let’s take a look.
All models by Warlord Games
First off we have Baron Larrey himself. I based him separately as I really like the focal qualities of the model. I like his pose; he really looks like he’s performing triage on the wounded.
A rather bulky model – he looks like a prize fighter compared to my Perry infantry!
As with the other humans of the kit, I worked from a macragge blue undercoat and worked up the colours as per my other infantry.
A nice little vignette which I’ll be using as a casualty marker.
Next up we have a surgeon applying bandages to a wounded grenadier’s arm. These models have quite a bit of character and I really enjoyed painting them up.
A sponge drifts in a bucket of bloodied water.
Of course, I had to take out my GW blood for the blood god blood effect paint and go to town on the unfortunate grenadier’s arm. Might’ve gone a bit overboard with it, though.
The cart itself is resin, which is the stuff of nightmares for me.
Finally, here’s the ambulance itself. It was undercoated mournfang brown and basecoated XV-88 whereas the roof was basecoated adeptus battlegrey, then the brown was washed agrax earthshade and the metal and grey bits nuln oil. Some drybrushes later and I have a nice enough looking ambulance.
I wouldn’t want to be carried to a bonesaw-toting surgeon in a cart like this
The loose models were mounted onto mdf bases from www.laserbases.be. For the cart itself I resorted to 3mm plasticard which I cut to a size conforming with my other basing – it’ll probably never be an issue, but I prefer some logic in such matters.
Et voilà, a nice centrepiece to my Napoleonic collection – that is, until I muster the courage to get started on Napoleon’s Berlin carriage! Up next: a few Crusaders, more Prussian Landwehr and the start of yet another small commission.
The Beautiful Alliance
It was only a matter of minutes before I caved in and put the 28mm mdf version of one of the most famous buildings in history on my Warlord Games wishlist; and my girlfriend duly responded by putting it in my Christmas stocking. I’ve painted it up within less than 24 hours of receiving it, which must be a first for me!
A great building by Sarissa Precision.
This is the first mdf kit I’ve assembled, and overall I’m really pleased with this kit. It was easy to put together with just PVA, and the instruction leaf is well-made. Tip of the hat to you, Sarissa!
I’ve gone through the trouble of adding glass to the windows, made from blister packs.
I’ve used basecoat sprays, of course. I sprayed the roof separately with mournfang brown, the main structure was undercoated with a light coat of white.
Several tufts of MiniNatur flowers were added to the porches to liven the building up.
The roof was fairly hard to get right; I used successive drybrushes of mephiston red, squig orange and dwarf flesh to end up at this point. It might still be a bit too dark, but I’m satisfied with the way it looks.
Quite cozy looking, innit?
Stock mdf buildings can often be a bit bare-looking, which is why I added some tufts and, most noticeably, some poison ivy to the one blind wall.
Overall I’m very happy with how it came out. I’ll be sure to take some pictures of my French with this as a backdrop soon!
First publication for Warlord Games’ newsletter!
In case you readers hadn’t noticed yet – or if you aren’t subscribed to it – an article of mine was published in today’s Warlord Games newsletter. So here’s a link to my first contribution – hope you like it!
Originally I wrote the article with a focus on the Perry Miniatures model of Ney, but some friendly chaps at Warlord sent me a free blister of their Ney and the accompanying French Brigadier – now there’s a nice gesture! They’ve also supplied me with a nice voucher which I’ve used to order up some extra goodies. I’m waiting on those final models to come in before I do a roundup of next year’s activities.
By the by, I’m already at work on the next article for Warlord. If it’s good enough to be accepted, great! If it isn’t, then I’ll post it up here anyway. Anyway, thanks for the clicks, and until next time!
Sneak Update – second French Légère battalion on the way
It’s that time of the year again – the one-hundred and ninety-ninth anniversary of the Waterloo campaign is upon us, and so my pile of Frenchmen gets some acrylic love. Ewww. A couple of weeks back I finally finished the first battalion of the 1e Légère, and I decided to strike while the iron is hot and dive straight into the second battalion of that regiment.
Before I show you the newly painted models, let’s first take a look at the Quatre-Bras order of battle, and specifically the 1st Brigade of Jérôme Bonaparte’s division, part of II corps:
Gen de Brigade Baudin
- 1st Btn, 1st Legere Regt (625 approx)
- 2nd Btn, 1st Legere Regt (625 approx)
- 3rd Btn, 1st Legere Regt (600 approx)
- 1st Btn, 3rd Line Regt (600 approx)
- 2nd Btn, 3rd Line Regt (600 approx)
There’s no way I’m going to be painting five or even six battalions per brigade, so I’m going to simplify this brigade into the following form:
Gen de Brigade Baudin
- 1st Btn, 1st Legere Regt
- 2nd Btn, 1st Legere Regt
- 1st Btn, 3rd Line Regt
- artillery
So in essence I’ve retained the character of the brigade – a majority of light over line infantry – but I’ve condensed it into something I can actually paint in a few years’ time without going mad. Even with this downsizing, I’ll still have eighteen battalions in my army! If I’m not sick of painting dark blue after that, I’m going to go back in and add the ‘missing’ battalions to their respective brigades.
Anyway, enough banter about boring lists, here are the models:
Models by Perry Miniatures, as is usually the case.
This is the first Napoleonic battalion I’m painting in batches of 12 instead of 8. This new batch size hasn’t bothered me in the slightest so henceforth all my units will be done thus. As you can see I went with the flank companies and command models first – they’re always a bit trickier to get right with their more elaborate shako decorations, not to mention the drummer’s vest! The next batch of uniquely centre company chaps will be more straightforward as a result.
A closeup of the battalion commander and drummer, with all the crudeness of my paintjob exposed.
One last thing I want to mention about these models are the two above. Quite a suggestive pose the officer is attempting with his scabbard, no? Still a nice miniature, though; they’re also metals from the Perry command pack I picked up earlier. But that drummer boy takes the cake – when I had a good look at him and noticed his bandaged head, I just had to bloody it up. Heroic!
That’s it for today! I have some more crusaders incoming, but I’m also starting a new job on Tuesday which leaves me a little uncertain about how actively I’ll be able to paint next week. In any case, I hope you liked reading this much overdue blog update, and until next time!
French Dragoons
It’s Yesteryear Wednesday again, and here are those French dragoons I promised you last week, when I showed you the dismounted guys. I’ve been doing some painting today, had a mediocre run on the Finnish track, and now I’m settling down with a couple of White Chimay beers and a good Bernard Cornwell novel for the night. But first, these dragoons!
Another finished unit of Perry Miniatures plastics.
Half of this unit was painted right after I came back from France in September last year, but I was so fed up with warpstone green’s coverage issues that I let the rear rank of the unit lie unpainted until the beginning of this year. That’s how bad it was! The impulse to paint them finally came this year when I played a game of WAB – Waterloo with a few veteran players; I had to borrow part of their collection, which I never like to do. There’s just something harrowing about considering the plethora of mishaps that can befall even a veteran wargamer when handling another player’s models!
A white horse for a ranker! Not an error I’ll repeat on future units.
I must confess I cheated a bit: this unit did receive some brush attention earlier this week. This is because I noticed that the spray varnish I used, the GW purity seal, had left some small white stains and a slightly foggy effect on some of the areas of the models. I don’t know exactly what caused this, and other models that were sprayed with the same spray can, but I felt it had to be corrected. Apart from this, the bases also received additional tufting as I had described last week.
Some further beginner mistakes: one of the epaulettes of the elite company is missing, and the elite company rode black horses.
So that’s it for these guys. There might be further Wednesdays in the near future where I demonstrate and discuss the existing units of my French Napoleonics as I go about tufting their bases – I still have two battalions of line and a squadron of 9th Hussars which I can show you. But in the interest of variety I will try and vary my offerings, much as I try to vary my week-to-week painting projects. So who knows what next week will bring!
As for progress on those Chevau-Légér Lanciers: slow. I’ve been having a busy week at work and some equally busy evenings, as well as a rather alcoholic weekend coming up, so I might not get the riders done in time. The good news is that I’m doing all eight of them in one go, which does mean I’ll be able to immediately show you a complete unit. Vive l’Empereur, Vive la France!
N. Bonaparte
I just got back from a weekend with the in-laws, which was great fun. We rented a vacation house and kind of surprised my father-in-law (who turned 50 yesterday) with a small party. Great food, plenty of quality beers and a long walk in the most northern of Europe’s wine regions. And some gift giving, too.
Another Perry sculpt, already a number of years old I believe.
As I mentioned previously, my father-in-law is kind of a Napoleon fan, mostly because of Waterloo and the damage that final defeat dealt to the man’s psyche. I myself am, of course, mostly interested in his tactical and strategic achievements, but nevertheless we had a few talks about the Corsican Ogre. Since I had a pack of these Perry Miniatures models lying about, the one with Napoleon, Maréchal Ney standing over a table and some other officers close by, I decided to make a gift of Napoleon and use the rest of the pack differently so that Ney is the focal point of my future vignette. A win-win situation, as it is my intention to steadily collect Ney’s corps at Quatre-Bras anyway.
Close ups like this always betray the crudeness of one’s painting techniques.
The model was painted up with standard layering and some washes, so no surprises there. Most areas were painted with familiar colour progressions, such as the skin, but often received an extra final highlight – the flayed one flesh edge paint in the case of the skin. The pantaloon and under-jacket (Napoleonic uniform purists will crucify me for that) were basecoated respectively rakarth flesh and celestra grey, both washed with black and then highlighted with diluted ceramite white.
I’m so glad the Perrys didn’t fall for the cliché of Napoleon grasping his belly in pain.
I think it’s about high time I talked about basing. Now I’m really lazy when it comes to basing my models, even though I shouldn’t be. I recognise it’s a really important part of how a model looks – it can both lift up a mediocre paintjob or tear down a great one – but I simply can’t be bothered spending much time on it. For my Napoleonics, and for this model as well, I’ve used coarse sand which was painted mournfang brown and then drybrushed with tyrant skull, and then stuck on some green clump foliage (I bought it in a miniature railroad hobby shop – I believe it’s small clumps of wool?) and some middenland tufts (GW tufts, the green variety). I’ve only been using these tufts for a short while as I used static grass for a long, long time, but they’re a great product (although there are obviously much cheaper alternatives from other companies).
And so another contribution draws to a close. I’ll have more for you this week, hopefully the Sarmatians by the end of it, and probably a small update in the meantime.
“War is the business of barbarians.”
N. Bonaparte
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