First unit of the year and looking back.

 I've not done much with this blog, after getting thrown out of TMP, views are way down, so I mostly use the blog now to have a place to hotlink pics from and keeping track of what I've actually been doing. 

Here's a list of last years production:

28mm: 

185 infantry.

50 cavalry.

3 cannon with 3 13 crew.

3 command.

Most of my 28mm is black powder period-specific, with most of it being either Napoleonic or SYW, but there is something other two, medieval,  Italian wars and Vietnam. 

In 10mm:

399 infantry

24 cavalry 

3 cannon with 12 crew

1 command. 

All my 10mm is black powder period, the war of Spanish succession,  Napoleonics and ACW. 

The big let down was I was just 18 figures away from my SYW passing 500 painted,  but I lost my inspiration. 

10mm was a new thing for me last year, with 3 projects, 10mm ACW(which I kinda fell off) 10mm Napoleonics and 10mm WSS. I found I prefer 10mm over 6mm, for me 6mm starts to lose the realism look, they are either not very real looking, or they look ok but are so fragile I can never make a unit with less than 40% broken bayonets. with 10mm you can get the massed look and still make them look like little people, both my Lancer 10mm and Van Dyck have multiple poses in the pack. so, in essence, they are just small 15mm or 28mm. That didn't have to make to many compromises. 

I need to finish Friant's 2nd division, I'm only missing 5 and a half battalions. and 2 howitzers, some skirmishers and leaders. in 10mm that's only about 15 days of painting. It's just about finding the inspiration. 

The year has been filled with lots of stuff 2020 has affected us, the wife has been worked to death because of temporary management change at work and the pressure from COVID, we had a litter that turned out total shit, and ended in the worst possible way with having to put a 5-week puppy to sleep... it affected me a lot and I was not myself for many weeks after that, I just hind in ghost of Tsushima a game for the PlayStation 4, playing it for hours a day, so I didn't have to think about the loss. 

But 9 weeks later, we had another litter, and unlike the first, here we got 5 strong wonderful puppies. 
We kept two, Drifa and Jøkul.

Jøkul to the left, a big dark grey boy, the last one born, Drifa to the right a black and white girl.

Here they are sleeping on the couch with their mommy Såga, I having been banished to the comfy chair. Their 3 siblings have all moved to Western and South Western Norway, all to great families. 

We also did lot of work of the property, the basement (that once long ago was a garage) will be made into a proper dog room, the first step was to expand the room with about 6m2 putting down concrete floor and building brick wall and putting in 3 windows and a door. This was done by father in law with a little help from me, he also helped put up a 3rd dog yard and saving the roof of the annexe by taking out the rotten beam holding it up and putting in a new one. 

So he was here helping us for about 2 months. 

For Christmas, I got my first antique sword, wifte had gone to great lengths to hide it from me(swords being kinda hard to hide the shape of) So she added one of her colleagues to the conspiracy. The swords also had to get to the in-laws without me seeing it, so it got a trip on an express bus by itself. And then I had to go hunt for it in the basement washroom at the inlaws. 

A 1796 infantry officers sword. Made between 1800 and 1807.
The first of at least 5 British Napoleonic Swords I plan on getting.

Then after Christmas, we had to make the tough choice and let Gaia go. She was 12.5, our oldest dog, mother of Såga and Orca and grandmother to the new puppies. She just didn't want to eat anymore. 
She was a wonderfully funny little dog, a great mother to her puppies who she lived with every day for 6 and a half years. She had a great summer and fall, really enjoying herself. But it was sad.

Except for puppies, she was always our smallest dog, a tough little dame, who did not know her own limitations. Even when she had started to get old and not at good on the legs anymore, she would jump and climb, running to fast and falling over just jumping up not giving a crap.

Gaia with her litter,

Gaia getting her belly rub, the only petting she actually enjoyed. 

Gaia meeting her Grandpuppies, this isn't that long ago, maybe two months and she was just fine then.

And now, the first unit of the year. 

His Majesty's Royal Regiment of Foot 

The Allied force so far, 3 battalions and a couple of squadrons of Prussian Cuirassiers. 

I have enough of these Van Dyck to do 5 more battalions, for the allies and 1 more for the French, And enough Pendraken cavalry to do a brigade of Prussian and a brigade of French. 

 

 My plan was to do some stand-in cavalry in hats while I'm waiting for Van Dyck to do cavalry. But knowing me, I would never repaint a unit I had already done just to get different hats. So instead the English/Scottish/Irish cavalry will have to wait. Instead, the Prussians got stuck with hats. First up is Margraf Phillip Horse/Cruiassiers. Figures are Pendraken LOA figures.

More 10mm WSS

 Finished Fergusons foot, I'm getting a bit tired of doing these, But we are doing a lot of work on the property and many days I don't have much time to do much. But doing these are quick, I can paint 13-14 in a few hours. So if I can get away for an hour to paint. I'll actually feel like I'm making progress. 

Ferguson's foot and Scots fusiliers together.

Rowe's Regiment of foot.

  First of 4 battalion's I'm working on for my WSS 10mm project. I hope one day to have all the English&scots/British regiments for the war. 

I found the uniform a little boring with red cuffs, the only facing colours is the vest.

                                                 But they look good, but will even better once they got 3, 7 or 14 of their                                                       buddies with them

Small Frenchies

 So I finally finished the Languedoc regiment for my 10mm WSS project. The first regiment of many I hope. The miniatures are the fantastic Van Dyck. I've finally gotten my hands on some of his allied figures. Enough I think to do 4 battalions. 

The first battalion has Maverick model flags, but some how I lost the flags for the 2nd battalion the year between paiting each battalion. So the 2nd battalion has just printed flag.

Each battalion of 41 strong for an 82 figure regiment, representing about 1000 men. or a ratio of 1:12.

I have a fake 3rd rank, consisting of  NCOs and drummers.

As I said they are fantastic figures, and the new allied ones are even better, the as one of the problems with the french figures is that the cross belt, particularly on the back would often be almost invisible. On these, the crossbelt is very clear and crisp in detail. No problem for the brush to pick it up.

River crossing.

Finished a couple of squadrons of dragoons from the 1st dragoons. Since 12 10mm Dragoons aren't that interesting, especially since I wasn't that happy with how they turned out. I took out Kister's brigade for a river crossing. The actual river kinda didn't show up in the pictures, but it is there somewhere. 

I got 24 more dragoons, So the 1st dragoons will get all 4 squadrons. And another regiment will be half-finished for some time. 

Up next for my 10mm Napoleonic project is more infantry. With my latest order from Lancer, I'll be able to complete Friant's 2nd Division, with added cavalry support(quite a lot of cavalry support. (10 squadrons) And a nice 12pdr battery from the corps artillery park.

15th Legere and Kister's brigade.

Gergoes Kister's Brigade at Austerliz, in Friant's 2nd Divsion of Davout's 3rd Corps.

 I had originally painted the line regiment as the 108, which was in its own brigade. But I decided to use 2mm think bases, as I feel 3mm is a little much for 10mm. But the post is slow and warbases were a little slow.

So they haven't shown up. And since I wanted the same bases for the whole brigade, I redesignated the 108 into 33rd and put it with the 15th legere to make Kister's brigade. So now I have to wait for the 2mm bases so I can paint the 108th again.

I also need to paint some more skirmish bases so the 15th legere can be parcelled out as either a bigger skirmish screen or as independent skirmishers.

 15th Legere, at Austerlitz this was bearly 300 strong with the combined two battalions.

Fun to paint, I feel the blue I use work great for 10mm, it would be too light for 28mm. 

 Skirmishers out in front.

 15th Legere in line, behind the skirmishers and the 33rd in columns behind.

Whole brigade line upfront.

Can't do much more until I get bases. I don't have enough 3mm even if I wanted to continue with the thicker bases. I have been working on some artillery. Might try and finish that. 

I finished a brigade!

Ok, so I cheated a little, first, it's 10mm, so doesn't really count, second, it's only 1 regiment strong.
And not even a big regiment, just two battalions. The 108th fought as it's own small brigade in the 1805-1807 period, in Friant's 2nd division is Davout's 3rd corps. At Austerlitz, the whole brigade was a giant 800 men! At that battle, it had support from two small legere companies. Totalling 70 men. 

I'll give them an extra skirmish base. To add to their 2 skirmish bases, once I get some skirmish figures.
The brigadier is Étienne Heudelet de Bierre at Austerlitz and Louis Joseph Grandeau at Auerstedt and Eylau. 

 The miniatures are Lancer, and very nice they are.

In other news, I'm working on setting up an outside table, I got a plywood board that's 4x8 feet. I need to do some carpentering, but maybe a nice big photoshoot on Tuesday.

46th Ohio

46th Ohio was in McDowell's brigade in Sherman's 5th division.  They were the far left flank of Grant's army at Shiloh. 

In 1864 the regiment was supplied with Spencer repeating rifles.

Figures are Good Ground. 

Half of Cleburne's Brigade

Cleburne's was a lowly brigadier at Shiloh, leading mostly Tennessee regiments with one Arkansas and one Mississippi regiment too. So far I've done 2nd, 5th and 24th Tennesse. 

Right now I'm working on a union regiment, might do a second union regiment before I get back to Cleburne. 

Two of the regiments are Good Ground, while the one seen previously is Pendraken, Good ground will be my main figures for this project, not only because they are made with Western Theater in mind, but now that I've seen them in person I really like the style. Slimmer more realistic proportions, pendraken might have more detail. But they are quite chunky fellas.  

I'm unsure if I got enough figures to complete the brigade. I ordered quite a mix of figures. I got 12 charging figures I really don't know what I'll use for.  I placed a second order for good ground for more union and confederates. Hopefully, that will let me complete both Cleburne's and McDowell's brigades. 

Tiny rebs.

Yet again, I'll try and do an ACW project. I'm giving 10mm another try. Apparently, I did do like 150 10mm ACW many years ago. And had forgotten I'd done so many of them.  I have no idea if I still have them someplace...

First unit up is made up of what I could find of the leftovers from that project. I did manage to scrape exactly 24 together. I also found like 8 union troops that looks to be Iron brigade types. This is the 2nd Tennesee from Cleburne's Brigade at Shiloh, it went into battle with only 365 men.
I haven't settled on a ruleset yet. But I'm leaning towards Picket's charge. I'm familiar with General d'armee which is more or less the same rules but for Napoleoincs. 

 It does look like the 2nd Tennesee used the Hardee battle-flag.  So I gave them that.

Not ideal pictures, I had to up the contrast something awful as it was too dark to take proper pictures. 

Tiny Languedoc infantry.

I saw these Van Dyck 10mm figures several months ago and thought they looked amazing. or more correctly unbelievable, this 10mm can, in theory, be painted as 28mm, if you have superhuman sight and a tiny tiny brush. I can't do that, but I did manage to use 3 layer method on most of the figures. 

The major uniform parts, jacket, stockings and cuffs all got 3 layers, the light grey jacket could be better, I had to mix grey and white to get the various shades and it's not ideal. But the blue and red turned out well. The leather also got 3 layers while the black, wood and hair got 2. The flesh gets 3 layers and ink between layer 1 and 2. The metal(bronze and steel) only got 1 layer. And so did the hatband.

I thought long and hard on how to do the unit. I toyed with doing different ranks based on the french vs allied ranks. So french would get 3 ranks to simulate 4 or 5 ranks, while the allies get 2 ranks to simulate 3. But it got too complicated and the french ended up with way too many figures to paint. 

So I did 2 ranks with a fake 3rd rank consisting of drummers and sergeants. The total was 41 figures. 

 I like these, the fact I took such close up picture hint that I'm quite happy with them.

 They are based on 3 bases so standard BLB basing. 

 They are based on 45x40mm bases, so 13.5cm frontage.  My 28mm BLB forces are 18cm, so not that much smaller. But over twice the numbers in the unit.

Showing the 3rd "rank" with sergeants and drummers, my plate didn't show the drummer uniform for WSS but kronosgraph shows royal livery for the drummers, so I gambled the regiment had the same 50 years earlier.