Essex Miniatures - test paint.

Well, I painted these yesterday afternoon and they came in at 1hour and 40 minutes, so not bad at all. I kept the paint palette fairly limited as you can see, selecting colours with good coverage to save any retouching where possible. My only real issue is with the Foundry flesh tone, it's pretty weak over black so I'll be looking to replace it with a Vallejo shade possibly. I had to go back a couple of times to paint a couple of bits I'd missed (the red/white of the shako pom-pom for example), so I reckon I could get this down to 1.5 hours as intended. This morning I quickly added a few 'canvas' patches to the backpacks to represent the typical cow-hide appearance of the originals. I'm really happy with the results and can confidently say I can produce at least 2 battalions per week now. I plan to add a mounted officer to each battalion base as I did with the 6mm versions.

This allows me to identify shades used and in which order - you can see that white and red were required twice.

Frigate progress.
First attempts to follow the Langton guide to rigging left me feeling pretty deflated, all fingers and thumbs as they say! It seemed incredibly fiddly and I gave up. However further research led me to this excellent guide (link below to PDF) to rigging using stretched and glue coated cotton thread lengths which looks far easier and much neater than tying minute knots around the masts of 1:1200 ships ...... so I'm going to give this method a try later. The stiffened cotton rigging is cut to size then glued both ends in position and the result is rigging lines that look realistically 'taught'. Pics to follow in due course.

Jeff's excellent rigging guide.