An Epic adventure and Bum Hussars !

Earlier in the week I caved in and ordered myself a single sprue of the Warlord Epic Waterloo British infantry from eBay. Having seen and heard so much about them over recent months I was itching to have a go and see what I could do with them. I'm sure everyone is now familiar with the product so I won't go into a long description of the content and layout of the sprue but suffice to say that for the grand sum of £5.50 I got100 infantry, a gun and crew and a mounted commander which is pretty good value in my book. The figures are of course 3D renders and measure 13.5mm head to foot in strips of 10 infantry. Super impressed I wasted no time in black undercoating 60 of them having first decided to cut the strips in half so 5 figures per strip which would fit a 30mm frontage base. I did this because I had seen it done in a YouTube video and it was a very simple thing to do without causing any damage, by cutting through the base and bending the strip they broke in half almost as though designed to do so. As I have no intention of doing a full on Epic project - I just wanted to see what they looked like painted up -I was struck by the fact that there are enough figures on the single sprue to make up 10 points towards a basic DBN army! A sprue of light and another of heavy cavalry (the light sprue contains a RHA 6lb gun and crew) and Bob's you Uncle. Of course there would be a lot of cavalry left over, but they are so cheap it does not really matter and besides there would be the potential to expand later.

Anyway, enough of my waffling, here are a few pics of the 60 infantry that I knocked up over the weekend and I must say I do like them. Of course I'd like to try others, probably just single sprues or odd figures but the Epic concept is something I could not even contemplate taking on. That said these figures would work very well for DBN and cost next to nothing.

Bum Hussars for Old John.

When John told me that he would be sending me a box of Bum Hussars to paint I confess I had no idea what they were. All was revealed when the box arrived (please see the pics below). It did make me titter in a school-boyish sort of way. I was struck by the poor quality of the box art and design in general and especially the painted examples on the front. John had told me the figures were extremely fragile and liable to break easily so care was required when handing them. My understanding is that this set are extremely hard to find and to be honest they are far from the best plastic figures that I have painted with soft detail and quite a rough surface texture so presented a bit of a challenge to paint. Given the fragility and the common issue of getting a good fit between plastic horse and riders without applying a bit of extra pressure as the glue dries John had made the decision to mount them upon Les Higgins metal horses which they fitted well and certainly saved me a lot of time. I used liquid superglue to attach the riders to the horses which worked fine and once dry used black primer to fill in any unsightly small gaps. I certainly think they turned out a lot better than the box artwork, the pics below were taken just before my final check over before applying the satin varnish. I'll wrap each figure individually for posting as the swords do still feel quite fragile.