Hurrah and Hussar!

Just to prove I'm still capable of painting figures as well as making buildings, here are a few squadrons of French Napoleonic hussars I completed this month.

1st Hussars

These are Italeri French Hussars (#6008), which are very nice figures and easily match the dragoons I painted recently.  The figures come in a variety of uniform combinations, with some sporting campaign overalls, with or without pelisse worn or slung.

2nd Hussars

I decided to make six bases and paint each pair as a different regiment.  So, to get a variety of uniforms I settled on painting the 1st, 2nd and 6th regiments.  The box comes with 17 figures, so to make up the last squadron I had to add a figure from somewhere else to get to a round 18 figures and therefore six bases of three.

6th Hussars

The extra figure is wearing a busby, thus masquerading as an elite company trooper, and is actually the officer from the Italeri Guard Horse Artillery set (#6018), the rest of which may feature in a future post.

With these hussars, I'm nearly done with 20mm French Napoleonic cavalry, although I did get a box of Italeri French Light Cavalry #6080 (i.e. Chasseurs a Cheval) a few months ago, which as a cavalry type were more numerous and more commonly deployed than hussars.  So I may get around to painting them next year, once I've got a few other projects out of the way first.

When Life Imitates Art

I've been in Mozambique this month, in the northern province of Cabo Delgado.  As part of the project I'm working on we went to visit a lighthouse on a rocky headland, where I came across an abandoned building that seemed strangely familiar.

As you may know, Mozambique was once a Portuguese colony and in fact they'd been present in the region since the sixteenth century or so, where one of the main 'exports' they were after was slaves.  And this reminded me of the tembe I made last year which would originally have been used by slave traders in that region.

The similarity with what I made last year and what I actually saw was therefore striking, even though this building was probably built last century as a guard house or similar.  Furthermore, the structure wasn't quite the same, as can be seen from the photo I took from the top of the lighthouse.

OK, so it has three sides instead of four but it looked pretty much the same from the front!  And by the way, here is the concrete lighthouse we climbed, which I have no plans to make.

It was 185 steps to the top and then a wooden ladder through a narrow hatch to get into the lantern.  Still, the views from up there were pretty good.

Oh, and Merry Christmas!