Anglo-Hanoverian Brigade.

 So the first brigade is "done" for my SYW project.
A sort of but not quite correct brigade for Minden.

The brigader Major-General Hon. John Waldgrave lead a brigade of 12th, 23rd and 27th foot, as well as two battalions of the Hanoverian Guard, and 9 6pdr guns. It was a big powerful force, Around 4000 men and 9 guns. 

I have the correct number of battalions, even the correct 3:2 British to Hanoverians. But except for the 6pdr and 12th foot, the units are wrong. My M.J. Hon. John Waldgrave leads the 12th foot, a British grenadier battalion, the 87th foot, and the Hanoverian Oberg and Estorff battalions. And a 6pdr gun.

I do plan on doing the historic brigade, but as I do random regiments, it will take some time. And given brigades and forces changed from battle to battle, this is a perfectly ok, what if brigade for none historic battles. I do plan on doing 3 6pdrs to represent the 9 guns, this battery did a lot of damage to both the French cavalry and infantry. 

From right to left, 6pdr gun, 12th foot, grenadier battalion, 87th foot, 

Second line, right to left, Oberg and Estorff

My next target is finishing my Minden allied cavalry brigade, I got part of the 3rd dragoon guards primed. Like the french cavalry brigade, it will be 36 strong. 

British grenaders.

 So IL2 took up most of my life the last two weeks, first about 12 hours of WW1 flying, and then another 18+ of WW2 flying, Fighting over Holland during Market Garden.

Here I'm taking down a Ju 88, it's like trying to down a Mamukil, I fired all 500 .50cal and 280 20mm. But it did go down at least, I almost got caught napping on the way back.

But the main point of this post is that I'm done with a unit, I did the first 4 months and months ago, And then I started on the remaining 20, but IL2 got in the way, so took a month and a half to finish them. 

The unit consisted of the companies from the 6 regiments at Minden.

12th, 23rd, 37th, 51st, 25th and 20th. 

This brings my Brtish up to 3 battalions and will be brigaded with my two Hanoverian battalions. 
This brings my SYW collection up to 14 battalions. I'm not tantalizingly close to 500, less than 12 away from it. I will probably do the 3rd dragoon guards to complete the 500 goal. 
But it's slow going because of WW2 flight sim and wife will so have 3 weeks of vacation. So I doubt I'll finish the 500th before sometime in late July at the earliest. 

May I present you

 I said I had sold stuff to afford a thing, well here is the thing. 

Well here is the thing. 

An original 1796 Heavy cavalry sword, very likely used by the 3rd dragoons in Spain, it has been sharpened repeatedly, it had typical knicks and damage from use. The scabbard has markings for F troop 3rd dragoons.

The blade is 88cm and some mm, total weight is 1079g with a balance at 16cm from the guard. It's a really nice good sword. feels great in the hand, far more nimble than what some claim. though there are variations, so some individual swords might be a little more unwieldy. 

My 3rd dragoons behind their real sword.

My 1796 HC above my 1796 infantry officer sword. There is about 400g difference between them

My new original next to my 1796 HC trainer. The trainer is based on the field modified ones, with a spear point. So I was expecting the original to be a bit more clunky, But even if the original is 108g heavier I honestly can't feel a difference in my hand when I go through the various drills. 

So yeah, it's been a few exciting weeks, trying to sell enough to afford it, getting it shipped, I needed insurance so that took a few days. Then it had to go through customs, luckily antiquities are different from regular goods, so I only paid about £160 in VAT instead of the £650 I would have had to pay if antiques used the same VAT as regular imports. 

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. 

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. 

 

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

The 3rd Dragoons

So these are the reason I started my 28mm Peninsula project, I've been waiting and waiting for Perry to do the earlier British dragoons. And when they said they were gonna do them soonish, I decided to jump on the Peninsula War bandwagon. Perry have several versions, But I choose to put mine in regulation uniform, Anyone of my troopers caught with none proper uniform will be flogged until I see bone. Proper cavalry use hats, helmets are for girls training with their pony. 

I painted them as the 3rd dragoons, who together with 4th dragoons and 5th Dragoon Guards made up Le Marchant's heavy brigade. I plan on doing all 3 regiments at roughly 1:20 scale. The regiments end up being "uneven" with like 15 or 16 figure units. So I think I'll expand 1  regiment to 24 figures while keeping the others 12. Which means 48 figures, which is a little smaller than the 54 I think the whole brigade would be at 1:20. None of the rules I have really deals with single squadrons. And one of the 3 regiments are really big enough for them to warrant being "big" 

 I like them, but sadly I feel the pictures don't really do them justice, they look better in the hands.

 They look spiffy with their blue facings and yellow lace.

 It's not that easy finding info on these earlier dragoons, at least not online for free as most stuff you find just deals with the later ones in helmets.

Now I'm gonna try and finish that french battalion I started on 6 months ago, just 1 base left to do.

I have a table! 

It's been over 7 years since the last table shoot. 

Sadly it rained(when it wasn't supposed to) So I had to pack down everything, And so the photos weren't the way I wanted them. I also had to edit out a rather fugly pink tent the wife had put up in the garden to paint some garden furniture. 

 This is put up with one side being Anglo-Hanoverian and Prussian vs French and Austrian.

French behind a stone fence, looking down the Anglo-Allied cavalry.

 The table is sparse with vegetation, I need to get more of my trees up and running. But even so, just having a few hills made it hard to depoly the troops 

 The Austrian defending the top of a hill, with French cavalry in reserve. I found 3 french squadrons didn't have their bases finished. So I had to photoshop the bases.

 Austrian Croats, don't what they do best, holding woods.

 The Prussians

 The Anglo-Hanoverians.

 The camera was not helpful and so several pictures were totally out of focus, so the Austrian cavalry didn't even get one picture. But they are there.