Roll Call!

Its been a while since I last got out my wee men for a parade so here they all are. At the last count April 2010 there was about 700 in total. Now I have (according to my son) 1,486 figures. Thats 786 French and 700 Prussian. There are also 64 British Penninsula infantry.

French Dragoons (yellow facings)

After several weeks (early August last posted) of not doing any painting of the wee men (redecorated our bedroom and it took ages) I have finally finished the last of my AB dragoons. I'm quite pleased with the result. As you can see these are in two regiments of 12 figures each, although could be doubled up if I ever play General de Brigade rules. These are the reserve/standing pose though you will make out a couple of charging poses on standing horses! You probably can't make it out from the photos but I bought some flowering shrub tufts (yellow) and some tufts of weeds(grren) from Aneconetis workshop. I added some static grass but this got tangled up with the weed tufts. Flags by AB. Only other thing I did differently was to experiment with how I painted some of the faces.

Basing modifications

I was mulling over the details of basing conventions of the various rulesets that portray Napoleonic combat. One thing that I need account for is the size of the unit, e.g. some of the British guards battalions and the 52nd light infantry had over a 1,000 men or so. Currently, I just use two 40x30 bases to represent a battalion irrespective of the number of men it contains. Looking at Paul's Napoleonics in Miniature blog I noticed he based his Russian elites on two bases each having four figures. Thats pretty neat, so what I was intending to do was to implement the scheme on the right handside using 20x30 bases form my elites but also for some fusilers/centre company men. The left diagram shows my current scheme. Of course I'll have to do this for my Prussians since their battalions weigh in at 800 men!

The diagram below shows what I mean, where O=officer, E=ensign, D=drummer, C=centre(fusiler), L=light, G=Grenadier.

Work in progress

Next on my list of things to do are some AB French dragoons (at rest pose), these will have yellow facings to distinguish them from the red and pink regiments. Depending on how I feel I may progress on with a horde of Prussian hussars (AB) or a batch of three battalions of Portuguese line infantry (OG).

I also received a couple of packets of OG Peninsula British Elite pose in 'at ready' and 'march attack' in stovepipe shako, I'll think I'll stick with the march attack pose as it looks decent enough.  I would like to use AB's for all my infantry but OG is the cheaper and more doable option.

Prussian Line Infantry

Yet another batch of line infantry - although by rights these troops with pink facings are reserve regiments. They are old glory and are a mixture of what I suspect are advancing and receiving poses, the pack I got from Time Cast was already open. The flags are by AB and are the new patterns for regiments numbered 13 and above, they didn't get these flags until September 1815. I used a mixture of basing materials such as static grass, tufts and some flowery tufts.

I'll probably replace the third battalion with advancing/skirmising poses to be more like the fusiler battalion as these did not carry flags.

3rd regiment of Westphalian Landwehr

Completed and based this lot tonight. These are oldglory figures and painted up reasonably well. I tried a couple types of grass- not too sure if it worked or not but the scatter looks really bright green on the photos. The OG pack contains 50 figures and makes a regiment of three battalions at 16 men per battalion. 1st battalion is identified by the mounted officer and the 2nd by two drummers. The flags are by AB.

Prussian infantry

These had been waiting to be finished for quite some time - anyway done them now. Figures are by Fantassin (Warmodelling) they are a lot cheaper than AB at £3.22 for a pack of eight but a bit more expensive than Old Glory at £13.50 for 50. Detail is not as crisp as either AB or OldGlory. Flags by AB and the mounted officer is by Old Glory.