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.
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.
