Essex progress and 20mm ECW's.

Having now pushed my 15mm Essex collection up to 350 painted figures over recent weeks I'm in a position to ease back a bit and return to regular commission work again. I'll continue no doubt to add a couple of units each week. This week I added an elite company to my French hussars, finished off a Polish infantry battalion, added another French artillery battery and painted the first half of a Cleve Burg unit - could not resist a few white uniforms. I only noticed the epaulettes on the 'fusiliers' as I was painting them but no matter, they will be finished off with command etc and fight as standard 'line infantry - 4 blocks'. I have more Russians on order now together with some Chasseur a cheval to finish off the fifth French cavalry unit. I'm keen to get them all into battle now.

The French artillery - note I have re painted the Guard battery with blue trousers. I'm still not happy with the colour of those guns!

In researching French Hussar uniforms I bookmarked this excellent blog dedicated to French Hussar uniforms. The short video I found fascinating, I'm not sure where it's taken from. If you are looking for info on any French Hussar unit this is a useful site.
French Hussars c1812.

I'm also waiting on more S&A Scenics trees, some Timecast 10mm buildings and more general scenics supplies. The S&A mat has been marked up in 95mm hexes for the time being as I need to keep buying figures and will then turn to the Hexon system. It's interesting looking back over my journey into the world of gridded terrain, I have learned that its important to get the hex size right for the figure bases in order to allow sufficient space for trees, buildings etc without leaving the units too over spaced. I think 95/100mm is about right, although possibly 120mm hexes could be slightly better. A table marked up in 95mm hexes comes down to about 4' x 3' only, so larger hexes would produce a slightly larger table. I'm still thinking and playing around with this. Still, things are slowly now coming together.

Commission work.
I'm into Graham's second 20mm ECW unit now, a greycoat unit, again of 54 figures. I'm a couple of weeks behind schedule owing to the Essex 'push' but now back into the routine and enjoying painting these figures again.

Bit overlit these pics, I forgot to put the grass mat down and got reflection off the glass I think.