20mm Russians & more rebasing!

End of another weeks painting and I have completed another of John's boxes. These 60 Russian Streltsy infantry will be heading home to Wales on Monday along with the dismounted Dragoons featured in last weeks post. Mostly by Strelets including some bonus figures and some Zvedza figures, all 1/72nd scale plastic John supplied lots of printed colour refences and requested units in Red, Green, Grey and Yellow tunics. Photos taken before my final check through and before the usual satin varnish. I think they will look very impressive on the table top and will be joining the Streltsy I painted previously. John tells me the next box is being sorted out to follow up! 

Next week I'll be painting 2 more WSS cavalry regiments for Tony, more lovely Les Higgins figures. I also have another 40 odd Russian Naval infantry (20mm WW2) on the way from Alister and a couple more 15mm ECW foot regiments from Graham so should all keep me busy.

Now I have to confess that having rebased all of the 6mm Crimean War figures (so far), that when I sat back and really looked at them I decided that the 3 deep basing style did not work for me! Ok, so a bit of time wasted but I really want to get this right and so off they all came again. To avoid the sticky mess caused by soaking I simply sliced into the MDF leaving just a thin layer which could then be easily bent to pop the strips off. This weekend I'm going to focus on getting them sorted onto the new bases. I have given this a lot of thought and decided to go for Brigade sized bases represented by 72 infantry and 24 cavalry to give a more massed affect, something that works well in this scale I think. I also really like the simple green colour which at the moment is grit and static grass texture free aside from the tile grouting which gives only a slight texture effect, I may well keep this as it sits very well on the green cloth. Below is what I have done so far, the bases are 2mm MDF (from Warbases) and 65mm x 45mm in size, so they sit comfortably in my 75mm square grid with space for a bit of terrain around them. I have to say I much prefer them like this so will keep going over the weekend. At the moment I have enough painted figures for 6 infantry brigades, 3 cavalry and 2 artillery per side, but I plan to keep building these up as ideally I'd like 10 infantry bases (720 figures) and 5 cavalry bases (120 figures) per side plus guns etc which could look quite impressive.