AAAAANNNNNNDDDDD it's done.

 The 13th legere fought many a hard battle, 5 battles honours, it fought under Davout from 1805 through 1812, and just to show their awesomeness, they took La Haye Sainte at the closing parts of the battle of waterloo. My favorite French regiment and I'm happy to see it on this scale. 

The numbers are 240 close order infantry in 3 battalions

24 skrimishers.

Total 264 for a single regiment. 

Up close and at eye level, you really do feel you get a good massed feeling.

The 3rd battalion was a bit of a slog, and not my best work, I just wanted it done.

264 down, 172 left.

General d'Armee will be my go-to rules, so this brigade gets 1 extra skirmish base as half or more of the brigade is light infantry. So the next regiment the 17th line will just be 2 battalions and 12 skirmishers.
Sadly Warlord being an evil capitalist corporation has decided not to give the British spurs any skirmish figures, meaning you can't do a proper Napoleonic battle, They, for some reason decided instead of giving you skirmishers, you get close-order rifle battalions. Quite useless and I can only imagine they did this for getting as much money out of the buyer as possible. 
We'll see if we will ever get line infantry skirmishers. Or I'll have to buy some small 15mm or big 12mm to use for that. 

So on to the 17th line, I was getting real tired of the legere uniform, so some white trousers and red cuffs will be nice. The line will probably be harder to get good, as you got the white part in the center of the jacket, meaning it will be harder to get clean neat white cross belts. 

 So in less than a week, the 13th leger has gone from zero to 160! I'm a bit over halfway now, well more than a bit, I have 104 left to do 80 more close order and 24 skirmishers. 

Two battlions in column

Looks good

I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on these, which is very cool. 

Not dead!

 Well, it's been almost two months since I posted last, a lot has happened since then, Christmas and New Year came and went, the whole of January went by, and Betty White and a crapload of other famous people died. 

My flight sim had taken a lot of time and I just haven't had any inspiration to paint. I need more paint and the paint is getting expensive and I feel I just bought some etc 

But I have finally finished a unit, I have painted some stuff here and there, but nothing finished. 
But I did paint for 7 hours in the last two days, my most intensive painting sessions in months. 
And this is what I came up with. 

Waterloo Epic from Warlord. 

1st battalion 13th Legere, my favorite french regiment.

80 close order infantry.

I'm the first to criticize Warlord for the general quality and business model. But these are cool, 
For one thing, they are actually shoulder to shoulder, something sorely missing from horse and musket wargaming. And gives a much better overall impression of it actually being a unit. I cut down the bases to minimize the gap between them, but I think I can make them even smaller. So I get a proper wall of cannon-fodder. 

80 down just 1520 left, plus some 220 cavalry. 36 guns, and 18 generals. 
My first goal is the brigade that the 13th was part of, that's 5 battalions, so 400 minis. 

Charge!

 So after almost 3 years, I have added to my HYW project. A unit of mounted knights/men at arms. 
Taken forever to do these. Did half long ago, then spent 3 weeks doing the 2 next and a few days on the 2 last.

8 mounted men at arms.

I spent forever working with decals on the last ones.

They do look like a colourful bunch.

Finally completed a unit.

 So the last "unit" I did was back on the 12th of June, since then I've only done a few odd figures, brigadiers, and Vietnam stuff, not any proper units. 


I started this back in February 2020, when I did the men at arms part of the unit.


Since then I've very slowly added the archer and gendarme part of the Ordinance Lance. 


I was inspired by Stuart at https://stuartsworkbench.blogspot.com/, I feel he is THE guy when it comes to details on this period in miniature. 

But he is doing Smaller scale actions with the rules he uses, I can't go into as much details as I hope to do full-sized battles, So my Company of Lance is a bit more abstracted. I also decided to have my archers as light lancers and not actual archers, it might be a bit wrong for 1510 battles, but seems that sometime between 1510 and 1525 the archers had become lancers. So I went for that. 

This represents a company of Lances, so 100 actual gendarmes, but with the added men at arms and archers, somewhere between 300 and 400 actual combatants.

The Gendarmes are in the center, 4 of them.

Flanked by 4 Men at arms, One of them a standard-bearer, that I did quite a lot of greenstuff work on.

The men at arms are again flanked by the archers, one of which is carrying a standard.

I have 4 other men at arms ready, so I need 4 more archers and 4 more Gendarme to finish another company of lances.  I need like 100+ in the end, and at this rate, I'll be done sometime after the sun expands into a red giant. 

The Gendarmes are Steel fist and so are the archers, while the men at arms are perry plastics that I've Italian wared up.

Chef de battalion

 I got an order from Mazzer's miniatures of Avanpost french.
I'm working my way through the order, with 1 base left to finish the battalion, I also have an 8pdr gun and crew to do. But I finished the Chef de battalion who will lead a 3 battalion brigade in Spain.

Avanpost are stunning figures.

I tried something different with the horse, unsure how well it worked.

I also did the trousers in a more off-white, keeping the pure white for the jacket, Also used a generally darker tone of blue, some detail might be lost, but it's more realistic. and makes the white and facings pop more. This new style will be more obvious on the infantry. 

French Cavarly brigade.

 I had planned on expanding my French units to I'd end up with a brigade of 60, which would be nice and impressive. But I'm not very tidy and have misplaced quite a lot of my Crann tara French cavalry. I'm missing 9 in fact to finish the last two regiments. So the brigade became a humble 36 instead.

Regiments, Mestre de camp Général, Cuirassiers du Roy and Talleyrand. 

It's led by Antoine Chrétien de Nicolaï, who really led a division of infantry at Minden, but so far my French army isn't big enough to require a divisional leader. So until a second French infantry brigade is done, he'll lead my cavalry. 

All these are Minden miniatures with Maverick cloth flags. 

Except for the Antoine Chrétien de Nicolaï figure who is really a Montclam figure from Crann Tara.

Mestre de camp on the right as it's the senior regiment

                                                  Followed by Cuirassier du roy

With Tallyrand at the far end.

Tallyrand being a nice typical french gentlemen regiment with a white coat and red facings. 

Still working towards 500

 So I'm back on the SYW waggon, working my way towards 500, I'm now at around 452 if I only include actually finished units. If I add the various half-finished I'm at 480. I had planned on finishing all my French cav, creating a nice big brigade of 60 cav. But I've yet again misplaced stuff. So I can only finish 1 more half-finished regiment. So that will be the next I do. I then have to look for other ways to get to the 500 marks, but I have a feeling I'll do a detour or two before I get to 500. I have a new super-secret project going on(or more like super-secret reactivation of a project. ) As well as getting some more Napoleonic stuff done.

Anyway, the latest unit for my SYW project is the very very stylish and handsome Cuirassier du Roy. 

                                               The only French cavalry regiment with both front and backplate and 

                                                having them above the jacket,

    The similaraties with the Napoleinc cuirassiers is obvius. 

As with most French regiments of the SYW, this one only had two squadrons. So this one is done done. 

Actually did something.

 Well, this is the first proper battalion-sized unit I've done since late January when I finished a Danish GNW battalion. Since then I've done this and that, painted some here, painted some there, every actually finishing anything, I got quite far on some Italian war gendarmes, but got annoyed when I didn't get the decals to work. So I stopped that, I worked on some Napoleonic Austrian cavalry, did a tiny bit on some SYW British grenadiers. Did 6 Russian napoleonic infanry. 

But this is the first unit I've finished in that time, In the last two weeks, I've been busy selling half of my miniatures, my reenactment stuff and my antique resolver to afford a super-secret thing that I will post about on the blog, as I did manage to scrape the money to get it. So it's in transit from the UK to Norway now. But I hate selling stuff, both the shipping, the danger of stuff breaking, and also I felt the thing I wanted could be sold at any moment so I felt I had a time limit to get stuff sold. But I did manage it, I sold for about £2000 in two weeks time. And I still have about £370 about to be sold this week. That will cover the VAT and then some. 

It's sort of miniature related but kinda not, more related to the history of some unit I have painted up. 

Anyway, what did I finish?

The 45th Foot, the second battalion in my first brigade of the 3rd division at Salamanca. 
I still have 1 more battalion and a crap load of skirmishers to finish this brigade. It's also the smallest of the 3 brigades in the division. 

I'm roughly working at 1:20 scale, this battalion is 20, it should be 22. But I'm rounding up/down

The next battalion will also be 20, the next brigade on the other hand will be strange. 
4 battalions, 1 at 42 figures, 1 at 20 and two at 15...

I also did the first base of my KGL hussars, but then an order of Avanpost arrived and well I had to paint those. so here is a WIP. 

I really enjoyed painting these, for some reason I hated painting the perry plastic French, I don't know why, they are very good figures, but I can't stand painting them, for some reason they take forever to paint. These 6 I managed to do in a day of semi intense painting, while 6 Perry takes me two days. Anyway, I'll continue with these and wait with more KGL hussars, I'm almost out of the blue I'm using for both of these, and I want to finish these more than the KGL hussars, so these get priority. If I still have enough blue left, I'll finish the hussars. 

Kinda 1st linge.

 Well, the unit for hell is done. I started this a year ago. But the damn figures are just to damn detailed, takes forever to paint, For the first 12 I used 6 layers of white and blue, but then I never finished. So I went down to 4 and 3 layers. But it still took forever. I felt after 18 where done. Originally I used the metal bicorne heads, but I gave up on my 1805-1807 project.

 So 12 of them got the guillotine treatment and on with the shako heads. Still took forever to do, so I left, came back and did the voltigeurs, started on the last base, the command base, gave up again, after half finishing them. But I finally finished them on Saturday. But only because I forced myself to finish them before I could start on other Napoleonic stuff. If I remember correctly, I now have 3 french battalions, 24 cavalry and a cannon.

 So now I'm gonna start on some Russian Jegers, I have 1 battalion done way back in 2015 done, and 24 hussars. So this battalion should finish the regiment.

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.

Armand, Vicomte de Belzunce, on a cold foggy morning somewhere in Germany, looking for his regiment/brigade while thinking about how hard he is going to beat his manservant for being late with the hot coffee. 

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.