Busy week so lots of new photos!

I like to record weekly progress here as it helps to motivate me as well as providing a record to look back upon. Last Sunday I finished off the two regiments of WSS cavalry for Tony (which have just appeared on his blog based up and with flags added). I actually painted the second unit of nine in a single day on the Sunday as I wanted to clear the decks for Easter Monday when we had a nice family get together here. As usual they got a coat of Vallejo Gloss varnish as requested which does bring out the colours really well. They are of course Les Higgins with command figures by Irregular riding LH horses.

Tuesday I started on more for Old John. As John gives me free rein to choose what order I paint them in I decided to start with the 24 Papal infantry of 1708. The references were provided for four lots of six different units with as you can see varied coat colours, facings, stockings etc which I think I matched pretty well. They are all Les Higgins castings.

Next I did the ten various horses (minus riders as John already has them). My horse painting has improved a lot since I started the commission work and I might do a post on the shades I use now for them at some point, but the note said 'mix of browns, black and roan'.

Then it was onto six German mounted Dragoons, (think these are by Warrior?), and again nice colourful uniform reference plate was provided. Finally for this week this morning I painted five more mounted troops, 4 x Maryland Dragoons and a Papal mounted drummer, red coats all these again working from colour reference sheets provided by John.

So not bad for six days painting (Tuesday - Sunday), 24 infantry, 11 cavalry plus 10 additional horses.

This week will be starting off with the lovely Minifigs carriage model below. Its a hefty piece of metal and the horses are huge, packed full of character, I know I'm going to enjoy painting this tomorrow and once again the supplied colour references as extremely helpful and I hope to achieve the same high standard finish as it should be a true statement piece for John's collection.

Below: references supplied.

6mm Crimean War.

Beside the above commission work I like to relax by ...... painting a few more soldiers for myself! The order from 'Supreme Littleness' arrived containing more 3mm building kits and I wasted little time in putting them together. I selected some of the larger buildings this time and discarded any additional small out buildings into the spares box. I found this second time round they went together in no time and the results were much better, I did not even need to look at the reference links. Because of course they are going to be used with 6mm figures I glued each individual building onto a 3mm MDF plinth cut to the size of the model base, discarding any supplied bases with slot in wall etc. The new ones will get a coat of paint this coming week and I'm going to order a few more of these simply because I enjoy making them so much. The idea is that they be free standing on a template to represent towns and villages. I'm happy with the scale effect and next job will be reduce the size of my clump foliage trees to match as they now look too tall!

I also managed to paint more Russian infantry, just waiting on a couple more command strips in helmets to finish them off which completes 12 bases of 72 Russian line so far.

Terrain continues to occupy my thoughts, I am incredibly tempted to bite the bullet and dot out my Geek Villain mat in hexes, just very subtle dots at the points. I have 5 packs of 90mm hexes from warbases for this purpose (so a 13 x 9 C&C grid just fits onto a 4 x 3 board), it's do able, I have done it in the past, but think the new mat matches the figure bases so well. It does however require a full day and plenty of care and patience to achieve accuracy. We shall see how the coming week goes.

Note the neat little metal caps supplied with the kits for the church etc. 

Easter Parade 2022!

This is the entire Crimean project so far laid out together. To be honest there is not really much further to go, probably another 3 infantry bases (2 Russian and 1 Turkish), 1 Russian heavy dragoon base and possibly 2 more light/skirmish bases. At that point I might focus on getting some games in with them.

Above: The Allied army.

Above: The Russians.

British Artillery.

Russian Artillery.

British cavalry

French cavalry.

Sardinians.

Brigade of Guards.

Highland Brigade.

Line infantry Brigades.

Below: latest off the painting desk are the Royal Horse Artillery, all Irregular Miniatures of course.

And a quick shot of the Russian Cossacks (48 of them!) galloping past the downscaled buildings which I think works just fine.

'Supreme Littleness' MDF buildings assembly and Commands & Colors nostalgia!

 As you may recall I wanted to see how these 3mm buildings would scale up alongside my 6mm Crimean war figures as representing larger villages and towns so ordered a few to try. I found some spare time to work on them on Sunday and enjoyed a couple of hours putting the tiny kits together and painting them. They ARE somewhat fiddly, I have to say, and require some patience but I think the results are worth the effort. Pushing tiny laser cut pieces from the 2mm MDF sheet requires a careful hand and I found my trusty tool (see pics) very useful for this, one broken section and the kit is ruined, but I managed to get everything out with no damage. 

It took me a while to figure out assembly - as no instruction sheet was provided - before I remembered that a link to a PDF for each model was contained within the confirmatory email, very handy. At first glance I could not make out what all of the arrow shaped pieces were for, until it suddenly dawned on me  that they were slices of roof sections! Rather clever as they are 'stepped' so that when put together they give a good tiled roof appearance. Care is required to line these sections up to get a neat finish, I'm aware that some of mine are less than perfect, but given the scale it's really not too bad. Overall, using PVA glue the kits go together well and once all of the roof slices are in place a robust little building results. The bases provided are a nice touch. 

I gave everything a coat of paint using basic shades. Cavalry brown seemed a good choice for the roofs which was later washed with black ink. I also found the Vallejo black ink wash the easy solution to painting in the numerous tiny windows by turning each building on it's side and dropping it in, the etched detail holding the ink in place as it quickly dries into the MDF.  The metal roof cap of the church was missing from my kit so I knocked up a replacement from green stuff for the time being, when I order more I will ask for a spare metal casting.

Scale wise I think they will work just fine with 6mm figures, the doors are about 5/6mm high and the wall sections around 4mm, I'll get a few photos of them alongside some figures in due course preferably on the terrain mat. The base texture is just tile grout painted and highlighted.

Overall I'm really glad I ordered these and I'll be ordering more from the range. I like the small footprint and the variety of building shapes and sizes. You do need to enjoy fiddly work to get the most out of these kits!

I also managed to finish the last two regiments of foot (Royalist) for Graham. As always the Peter Pig figures are a pleasure to paint. Graham informs me that there are more cavalry and artillery to go yet before the project is finished so that's good news. Meantime I'll be painting for Tony before returning to more for Old John for whom I have a drawerful of delights including a lovely horse drawn carriage with kettle drummer for later down the line so the painting service continues to tick over nicely.

On the 6mm project front I have more in the pipeline, Russian infantry, Turkish infantry, Russian heavy Dragoons and the battery of British horse artillery. I'm also planning a Commands & Colours style hex board marked up with 90mm hexes. I enjoyed a lengthy conversation with Tony ('Foy') the other week and we chatted about the game and why we enjoy playing it so much - it was Tony who introduced me to the game 10 years ago - and I just can't seem to tear myself away from it! This is a link to my very post here about C&C (May 2012!), I referred to it as a Eureka moment at the time.

Command & Colours Napoleonic - a Eureka moment!

And finally a shot from around that time - 2012 - of my first C&C table in my wargames room. The early version was a Citadel mat marked up in yellow dots to a 95mm hex grid (don't ask me why 95mm and not 100mm). Tony kindly gifted me the dice, the cards were printed half size and cut out by hand and I also printed the square trackers and playing sheets etc although I did subsequently purchase the game and expansions it was a good was to try it all out.

Have a relaxing and peaceful Easter.

Lee.