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.

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.

End of year raport

Well, it's just a couple of days left in 2017 and I did manage to squeeze one more unit out of the year.
I did try and finish it as I noticed I had 1 post more this year than last year, but this year I did the end of year raport for 2016 in January 2017, so it was really even. But with this post and a new unit, I did beat last year.

I'm actually supprised I only beat 2016 with 1 post, I did 9! Napoleonic blog posts in a few months. I felt really productive, yet I beat 2016 with just 1 post...

Let's just get going with the new unit.

This is a sort of generic second/3rd line unit, it could be Nyland 5 mennige regiment, that is what I planned it should be, but apparently, that unit never numbered more than 100.
Or it could be the Åbo/Nyland/Björnborg 3-mennige regiment, they did use grey coats in 1700, but they also used karpus, while this one has a mix of tricorne karpus.

So it's both and neither. The reason for the unit is that I've gotten a bunch of free "damaged" Swedish figures that are missing their bayonets.
So I just bought the command pack, I think I even got the flags for free so the unit ended up costing me a whopping £8.5.

I got a second Swedish battalion in the works and it's about time the Swedes got some love, last Swedish I did were back in February.

So what else did I do this year.

12 Numidian cavalry
12 Medieval mounted knights.
24 SYW cavalry
18WSS infantry
6 WSS cavarly

Some half finished unit, that are:
HYW infantry,
SYW infantry,
WSS infantry
WSS cavarly.

But the year has been dominated by the two period Great Northen War and Napoleonics.

 48 GNW cavalry(18 Swedish, 18 Danish and 12 Saxon dragoons.
62 GNW infantry(40 Saxon and 22 Russian)
3 Swedish command.
3 Saxon command.
1 Saxon Gun with 5 Crew.

The Napoleonic score ended at:

120 Infantry(72 French, 24 Prussian,  24 Russian) (plus 12 more Prussian in a half-done unit)
36 Cavalry(24 French, 12 Russians)
3 French Guns.

Both of these periods I have several hundred unpained, Same goes for SYW.
I think/hope these three periods will dominate 2018, But I suspect my HYW period will get some love too.
I'm running out of space, and I want to scale back my other periods. That mostly means getting rid of my Ancients and pike and shot stuff, sadly it's hard to sell stuff when living on the end of the world.



So here are a few pics to show of 2017.

 Saxon force

 French Guns, fun project, involved finding guns from all over the world and my first proper conversion.

 French Force

 3rd battalion Azov regiment

 One of two WSS units this year, French Ponitau

 Second WSS unit, Dutch  Saxe-Heilburg.

 My first unit of Warfare Russian infantry, expect to see A LOT more of that next year.

 My Anti-Swedish coalition army, since then several units have been added to it.

 My SYW project this year mostly saw cavalry, Prussian Cuirassiers 

 2nd Dragoons the Scots Greys.

 Allied Pricipes

 My Swedish army reaching the half way mark.

 The first unit I started on for my  GNW project, started late 2015, finished it in February 2017 the 48 strong Småland cavarly regiment. 

And so far my only Danish cavalry regiment. 

My Danes need more love both in cavarly and infantry.

Warfare will soonish (I think) release Danish infantry, I also hope they will release their dragoons in tricrones so I can do some Danish(and Norwegian) dragoons.

So 2017 is coming to a close, the world is still here(bearly) 

Besides Miniatures, we've added two dogs to our pack. Dalbris she was born in April this year, and Polaris who is just 11 weeks old. 

I did an army commander

Come meet Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg.

He is my favourite "looser"! He might not have been one of the great "Captains of his age"
It's kinda hard to be when your contemporaries are Eugene of Savoy, Duke of Marlborough and Duke of Berwick.


But he was a lot better this his failures against the Swedes. While he lost battles like Fraustadt, he did do a good job, he knew his business, and did surprise the Swedes earlier by his aggressive tactics. He also served in the Low countries from 1708 and fought well under Eugene at Malplaquet.


The figure is actually the new Shermetev figure from Warfare's GNW range, but give him a red coat and you have Schulenburg.

On his left, he has a trooper and cornet from the Saxon Chevaliergarde, I thought it appropriate he had some bodyguards from that regiment.
This involved creating a "feather rim" on the tricorne of the trooper, way too big because I can't model if my life depended on it. The Chevaliergarde are also warfare figures.

While we are on the topic of can't model, same goes for that well, apparently making a good looking well is "well" above my pay grade.

At least the cannonballs I made look roundish.

Schulenburg will lead my Saxons, but also lead my not very historic Dano-Russo-Saxon coalition army.