28mm Prussian Napoleonic Cavalry

Here's a commission we did of the Napoleonic Prussian cavalry for a customer. He does his own basing so we finished everything up to that point, so they are appearing here still on their painting sticks.

The first unit is the Brandenberg Cuirassiers:

The second unit is the Silesian Cuirassiers:

Nice figures and I'm happy with the way they turned out. Typical Perry quality, with some clean up required due to the worms they use to insure good castings. I've found it isn't hard to remove them, turning the figure over and feeling for the worms. Plus, once you do a couple of the same figure you learn to know where they are located. Now don't get me started on that fake cotton batting they pack them in. I HATE that stuff...

28mm Napoleonic French

Well Fall In is over and I now have a moment to try and update the blog. The shows are always a busy time as we try and cram as many deliveries into a 2-3 day period plus try and offer a few new items for sale from the display table. We don't always succeed at the latter. The hectic schedule means we often do not have the time to update the blog or website, and often we do not have the time to take a few pics of things we recently completed. I did set aside a little time and took a few pics of things which will appear here over the next few days. The rushed schedule, however, means there are not as many pics of the items as usual so you may see some posts with an odd collection of items.

This post will focus on some 28mm  Napoleonic French. This batch included some line from about 1812-ish and some artillery from earlier in the Napoleonic Wars.

Here's the French Line. These are figures are from Foundry and the flag is from The Flag Dude:

Some pics of the officer:

Here's some images of the artillery. These figures are from Eureka:

After painting loads of Napoleonics in 15mm it was refreshing to paint these 28's!

28mm Napoleonic Prussians Start Off the New Year

The first order getting sent out this year is a commission of 28mm Napoleonic Prussians manufactured by Calpe. Calpe makes a great figure with fine detail and good character. There are two units for the customer: the I and II battalions of the 3rd Silesian Landwehr from 1815. Since the customer will be doing his own basing the figures are still on the painting sticks.

Landwehr uniforms were all over the place. Since supply was spotty units could appear varied not only from their uniforms but also from their equipment. We chose to go with grey trousers for one battalion and white for the other. Since the time period is rather late we didn't vary things up so much figuring supply might have been better toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars. I had sources that placed both black coats and blue coats on the Silesian Landwehr but went with the blue.

15mm Napoleonic Russian Army Based for Lasalle Ruleset

15mm Napoleonics are pretty popular for us. They race neck and neck with 15mm World War II for the most popular periods we paint. I can understand why with Napoleonics: the uniforms are complex and require quite a bit of research, there are usually a ton to paint up to get an army together, and it can be rather monotonous painting over 300 of the same thing over and over again! I know I was feeling that way with this order. It took me a bit longer to get the order done but to be honest I was also trying to get some of the cleaning and priming done for the Fall-In orders. More on that at the end.

There are 317 foot, 114 mounted, 21 guns and 6 limbers in this army. All figures are AB figures and the flags are from The Flag Dude. The bases are from Litko.The army is supposed to represent the Russian Life Guard Division during the Battle of Borodino.

The infantry composed of the Preobrajenski, Siemenovski, and Izmailovski regiments.

The cuirassier units composed of the Emperor, Empress, Chevalier-Garde, and Life Guards units.

The army and sub commanders.

The artillery stands. Two units of Position Batteries and one Horse Battery.

A note on the limbers: Technically there should be more space between the ranks of horses on the Russian limber teams due to the way design of the yoke. This would result in exceptionally long bases and possibly have consequences in game play. In order to make everything fit on the base size I had to condense things a bit and widen the space between the two columns of horses. This makes the limbers about the same size as the French ones he already has and keeps anything from hanging out over the edge of the base, preventing damage during game play.

The bayonets of the AB Russians are a bit fragile. In fact, almost all of them were bent over in the packaging, some more than 90 degrees. I straightened them as best I could but I didn't want to keep moving them around further weakening them, as some had already broken off. . Since they need to be packed up and shipped out to the customer I am sure some will need a slight readjustment afterward. That is a downfall of more realistically proportioned miniatures: weak parts. Personally I prefer something more robust, especially for gaming, since it will be handled more often.

Now that this order is out of the way I can jump into the Fall-In orders. There's still an order of Reapers that needs based up (about 50 figures), and some basing to do for display orders for Acheson Creations and Scale Creep Miniatures, but the painting for the other orders is out of the way. We did manage to get a couple of things done already but the lion's share of it still needs done. I laid everything out on the dining room table Saturday to get it organized and take stock of where we were and here it is:

Orders for Fall-In

These figures are already painted and simply need to be based.

The lead I already need to clean and prime yet. It will add about 3-4 more trays of figures to be painted.

Hopefully I can get it done. It will be tough as there's only about a month until the show and Allison is due to sub for a teacher going out on maternity leave. It'll be a rough October!