Chasseurs à Pied

In addition to the ongoing development of my early Napoleonic Russian and matching Württemberg armies in 15mm, I also have quite a few plastic 20mm French, mainly for historical reasons. However, some of these saw action in the first game of our One-Hour Wargames mini-campaign.

HäT Industrie - Guard Chasseurs à Pied

Nevetheless, one thing I didn't have was any guard units (apart from some Italeri Guard artillery).  That said, I do still have the contents of a box of old Airfix Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard but, although they are nice sculpts, they are quite small compared to the other units I have which are mainly Italieri now (although with some legacy Airfix units still knocking about) and not worth painting.  I also like to have units in marching poses if I can, so these HäT Industrie (8170) Guard Chasseurs à Pied were ideal.

More of same

There are (I think) three marching-ish poses in the box and enough to make a unit of 15+1 men, when based for the WRG 1685-1845 rules (60mm wide bases).  However, for some reason an officer is not included in the box, so the chap in the front rank brandishing a sword is a converted Italeri Guard foot atilleryman promoted from the ranks to regimental commander.

Overall, they are nice sculpts and are similar in size my Italeri line units.  They also match in style and quality my average painting abilities (but slightly better basing skills).

Russians and French

I'm still expanding my 15mm Napoleonic Württemberg army, and intend to add more now that, at the time of writing, Warrior Minatures has commenced trading again (urrah!).

Russian Uhlans (Polish), Warrior Miniatures

In the meanwhile, here are some Polish and Tartar Uhlans in Russian service I finished recently.  

Russian Uhlans (Tartars), Warrior Miniatures

They can be difficult to distinguish, except that the shabraques are different and the Polish penant is blue above red, whilst the Tartar penant is the other way up, although the Tartars do also have red czapkas.

French Dragoons, Warrior Miniatures

The Württembergers also got some French allies, in the form of a regiment of dragoons.  These will eventually be supplemented by some French infantry, this time from Magister Militum, bought, sadly, in their closing down sale (whilst Warrior was offline).

Artillery limbers, Warrior Miniatures

Finally I have some artillery limbers.  These are actually Warrior ACW limbers, normally with two horses, which I modded slighly and then added more horses.  I painted them as Russian artillery, but they could be used for anything really.

Next up will be some more Württemberg cavalry and probably the French infantry, but I need to get around to painting them first.

The Württembergers are Coming

Having painted quite enough 15mm Napoleonic Russians for the time being (see various previous posts, plus this glorious AAR representing their first outing), I decided that having an opposing army of my own on hand might be useful.  I suppose I could have gone for the obvious one, the French, but decided that something from the Confederation of the Rhine might be more interesting.  Enter Württemberg.

Warrior Austrian infantry painted as Württembergers

Then there was the question of what figures to use.  As my Russian army is pre-1812, I decided Württembergers in helmets rather than shakos would be more appropriate.  Not easy to find in 15mm, but then I realised that early Austrians would do just as well if painted up properly, and the simple yet very effective range from Warrior Miniatures would be just the job.

Württemberg 1st and 2nd Regiments

From what research I managed, I discovered that at that time there were nine line regiments in the Württemberg army, with distinct facings and flags.

Württemberg 4th and 5th Regiments

I therefore decided to paint just the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th Regiments because that matched the number of figures I'd bought and also the 3rd Regiment had dark blue facings which I knew would turn out the same as the tunic colour.  However, for the typical size of wargame I would be likely to run (e.g. using scenarios from One-Hour Wargames, where six units in total is usually the maximum) I considered this enough to be getting on with.

Württemberg Light Infantry (Jäger) in open order

In addition to the line regiments I also painted up some Austrian infantry in shakos (each with its green 'turban') as Württemberg light infantry.  As you can see I had them deploying through an area of cleared woodland, the tree stumps being made from cloves liberated from the kitchen spice cupboard.

Württemberg Jäger-Regiment zu Pferd Herzog Louis (3rd Regiment)

For cavalry I used Warrior's Austrian Cheval Leger and finished some as mounted Jäger zu Pferd (green uniforms with yellow facings) and others as Württemberg Chevau-leger (blue uniforms with yellow facings).

Württemberg Chevau-leger (1st Regiment)

I also painted some of Warrior's Bavarian foot artillery as Württemberg artillery.  The helmets are probably not quite right but at 15mm who will notice.

Württemberg foot artillery

Finally, there was a general or two to paint.  I think these were Warrior Prussians but again who would be able to tell the difference.

A Württemberg general

Having completed all these I felt inspired to maybe add to the collection, such as getting some French allies for my compact Württemberg army.  However, sadly Warrior Miniatures is not currently active, although I have heard rumours that it will be coming back on-line sometime in 2025, which I really hope happens.

The Russians are Coming No.5

Just a quick update with another addition to my collection of 15mm Napoleonic Russians.  In this case I painted another general, to add to the four I already have.

This is a 15mm Warrior figure, in fact a Prussian general, but I thought it was quite a nice model so he was transferred to the eastern front.

As you can see he is riding past a French casualty.  This figure is actually from Peter Pig's AK47 range, sent back 150 years and painted up to pass as a fallen French officer.

The Russians are Coming No.4

OK, last post about my newly painted 15mm early period Napoleonic Russians (until the next lot are ready, probably).  Just some generals and artillery.  There was a bit of a mix and match going on with these artillery units.  The guns are actually from Naismith (Navwar used to sell them) but the figures are either Warrior or Roundway. 

Warrior figures; Naismith guns (Russian 12lb)

I paired the Roundway crews with Naismith "Licornes", which I believe were a sort of cross between a cannon and a howitzer.  These have some odd zoomorphic handles on the top (i.e. they look like animals) and apparently Licorne is Russian for "unicorn". 

Roundway figures; Naismith guns (10lb Licornes)

I have four more guns (with crews) to paint and base and these will have Warrior cannons, which are noticeably larger than the Naismith guns.  And just to note that the Russian crew have black collars and cuffs piped in red.  To do these I painted the facings red and then over-painted in black to leave the piping along the edge.  Quite pleased with that which is why I mentioned it.

Warrior: Russian general

The generals are all Warrior and I apologise for the photos being a bit blurry/far away.  I like these figures as they're quite jaunty (well I think so).

Warrior: Russian general

This last one is actually a Warrior Prussian general (probably supposed to be Blücher) that I painted in Russian campaign dress.  Being a bit of a dull composition on his own I added a spare standard bearer (flag still to be added).

Warrior: Prussian/Russian general

Anyway, that's it for now you'll be relieved to learn.  I've a few more infantry regiments, artillery, dragoons and more cossacks to paint (one can never have enough cossacks), plus some (surprise!) German allies to supplement Geoff's French.  I expect I'll be busy over the Christmas holidays getting those done...

The Russians are Coming No.3

Having shown you my new 15mm Russian infantry I thought you may like to see the cavalry as well.  As with the infantry these are a mixture of Roundway and Warrior, mainly the latter.

Warrior - Don Cossacks

My favourite cavalry figures are the cossacks by Warrior, in their long blue kaftans and massive busbies.  I think they're really cool, so here's another photo of them.

Warrior - Don Cossacks again

In addition to these I painted two regiments of heavy cavalry, specifically the Emperor's Curassiers (blue facings) and the Ekaterinoslav Curassiers (orange facings).

Warrior - Emperor's Cuirassiers

Of course in this period Russian curassiers didn't actually wear the cuirass.

Warrior - Ekaterinoslav Cuirassiers

In addition to these I painted some dragoons, in this case the Kurland Dragoons.  These are Roundway figures and the helmets are a bit bulbous compared to the Warrior figures.

Roundway - Kurland Dragoons

I still have a few more regiments to paint include some Warrior dragoons and uhlans plus a few more cossacks.  One can never have too many cossacks I always think, particularly as the one thing I've always been short of on the table is light cavalry, especially cossacks.

The Russians are Coming No.2

I've been meaning to post some pictures of the 15mm Russian Napoleonic army (pre-1812) that I have been working on this year but kept delaying because I was trying to get better pictures.  However, I've decided to go ahead and post this anyway because a) I don't have a decent camera b) the figures are actually quite small (being 15mm) and c) I'm not very good at taking pictures.

Roundway - Lithuanian Inspection, Murmansk and Rostov

As discussed in a slightly earlier post I decided to go for a mixture of Warrior figures with some Roundway.  They are pretty much compatible on the table although I generally didn't mix figures in the same regiment (exceptions apply, see below).  My intention was to have an early Russian army which means that regiments would still be organised into 'inspections' instead of divisions. 

Roundway - Lithuanian Inspection, Ekaterinoslav Grenadiers

This was party because I was using figures with earlier uniforms (especially Roundway) but also this meant I could paint different facings on the regiments, instead of them all just being red, as in later uniforms.  Furthermore, at that time the NCOs of different regiments carried halberds with different colour hafts (black, coffee or yellow) which applied to the drumsticks too.  Also, I don't like the kiwer much.

So, I started off with the Lithuania Inspection and painted them as the Murmansk & Rostov Musketeers and the Ekaterinoslav Grenadiers.  This worked fine until I realised that all of them would have the same flag, being similar to the green and white version that was adopted universally in the 1812 reforms (flags are all hand painted by the way).  So I decided to mix things up a bit going forward.

Warrior - Siberia Inspection, Tomsk regiment

And here are some examples including the Tomsk regiment (which naturally was chosen partly to honour a certain childrens' programme from the 1970s), and the Kazan regiment from the Caucasus Inspection.

Warrior - Caucasus Inspection, Kazan regiment

The idea was to get a variety of flags and facings and also, crucially, that the names of the inspections and/or regiments should be easily pronounceable for a non-Russian speaker like me.  Finally, I added the iconic Pavlov Grenadiers (flag still to be done).

Warrior - St Petersburg Inspection, Pavlov Grenadiers

Someone was telling me that the mitre continued in use in other grenadier regiments as well as the Pavlovs, but for now these will be the only guys sporting this impressive headgear on the tabletop.

Pavlovs advance purposefully

Having painted these I still have a few more infantry regiments to do (mainly Warrior) which will span various inspections and regiments including Kursk, Riga and my particular favourite the Astrakhan Grenadiers, which despite being from all the way over on the Caspian coast is, oddly, in the Moscow Inspection.

5th Jagers (turquoise facings)

To complete the infantry offering I also did some bases of Jagers.  At this time they wore uniforms of a paler green than the line regiments and sported rather natty top hats. The advancing figures are Roundway although the NCOs and officers are Warrior and as you can see they are a little more chunky.

6th Jagers (orange facings)

The drummer here is actually a spare musketeer with a modified shako.  I filed this down to be more cylindrical and added a brim at the back made from a sliver of plastic from a biro inner which was just the right radius.

For information (and so I won't forget when I come to paint the next batch) for the line regiments I used Tamiya JA Green (XF-13), which is the same colour I had previously painted some T-34 tanks.  For the Jagers I used Tamiya NATO Green (XF-67).

Finally, I would like to draw the reader's attention to the basing.  This was my usual coarse shelly sand painted earth brown then flocked.  However, for the Jagers I thought I'd do something different and have them advancing through broken ground, with the trees, stumps and fallen logs all being made from some dried cloves I found at the back of a kitchen cupboard; variety, as they say, being the spice of life.

ACW Adventures in Basing No. 9

A very long time ago (2012 to be exact), I did a post featuring a box and some unpainted sprues of 1:72 Italeri ACW Union Cavalry, promising to get on with them ASAP.  The good news is that I have now finally finished and based them.

These are very nice figures and being a slightly stiffer type of plastic hold the paint very well.  It doesn't come out clearly in the photos but I painted these using a two stage tone system, i.e. after a thorough black undercoating I did the base coat colours (mainly from an old but trusty pot of Revell 5077 blue - which I use for painting Napoleonic French as well) and then some highlights with a slightly lighter blue.  It's the same system as I use for 15mm figures.

Faces were done using a 'rust' coloured base (Revell 37 Reddish Brown) and then flesh colour daubed in four places: on the cheeks, nose and chin.

Horses were initially painted in various shades of brown (e.g. Revell 85 Braun, and some in darker browns).  Thin black wash was then applied to each horse's face, manes, tail, legs and underparts in layers generally to build up the contrast and create variation across the animal.  Tackle was painted black afterwards.

Finally, I needed to upgrade my generals, which are very old plastic Spencer Smith figures (technically 40mm I think).  I stripped these down from their flat mid 1980s' paint job and removed the mould lines properly this time.  After painting, all figures were varnished using Windsor & Newton "Galeria" acrylic matt varnish, as recommended by a couple of people on the TMP forums.

Basing was my usually coarse shelly sand on MDF bases, with added static grass.  For some reason I never painted the sand on earlier ACW figures I'd based, so I kept with tradition on these ones.

So, remarkably, that's pretty much all of my ACW figures painted.  The only thing I might need is some dismounted replacements for the cavalry, but they feature so rarely in our games (when we have ACW games) that they're not even on my list of things to do.

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.

French Generals

I've not posted for quite a while but that doesn't necessarily mean I've been idle on the wargames front.  Although I have.  A bit.  Anyway, here are some figures I completed recently.

They are three 20mm Minifigs French generals that I must have bought some time in the 1980s and which have been lying around undercoated for decades.  So, as I've been painting 20mm French Napoleonics recently I thought I'd get these finished too.

Acceptable casualties.

Having improved my horse painting (in my opinion) over the past few years with my efforts on dragoons and cuirassiers, etc., the horses were straightforward.  However, for these guys I wanted to have them on round bases (not WRG 1685-1845 standard general bases, note) with something else going on to distract from what are fairly dull figures (apart from the paint job obviously).

For the first one shown I finally managed to work in a casualty figure from my first ever box of Airfix Napoleonic French (c. 1976), just lying there whilst the general rides by nonchalantly.

The next one is probably the dullest figure in terms of pose (ignore the hat), so I painted him as per the illustration on the dust cover of my trusty 1977 reprint of Jack Cassin-Scott's Uniforms of the Napoleonic Wars in Colour 1796-1814, which apparently was Marshall Bessieres' getup.

You want it in green and red?  Why, anything you say colonel.

For this one I decorated the base with some gravel and behind the figure is a tree-stump made from a clove I found in a takeaway curry (I've got a few of those drying in my bits box now).

Note clove pretending to be a tree-stump.

It was a bit bendy even after drying so it has had a good few coats of paint to stiffen it up.  Also, I had thought to add some foliage to it but then considered that maybe there would be just too much green on this one.  It's amazing how much you can write about something you found in a curry.

The last figure is more soberly attired and sitting calmly on his horse beside a wheel from a (1970s) Airfix cannon (the one that came off the cannon on a dragoon base in fact).

Three wheels on my waggon... no wait, here it is.

However, displaying remarkable sangfroid the general is ignoring something else going on on the other side of the base, which is slightly more alarming.

Well pick it up and chuck it back then.

As you can see, a large cannonball has furrowed the ground just next to his horse.   This was made using one of those round headed pins you used to get with new shirts.  I cut most of the pin off leaving about 5mm so I could secure it into the base.  A spot of black paint and some light dry-brushing with steel finished the job.

Jägermeister

I've still got the painting bug and am currently working on my 20mm French Napoleonic collection (see earlier posts this year).  Having completed various infantry units and some excellent Italeri dragoons, I thought I should really paint those Esci cuirassiers that have been under the bed since about 1990.  In fact I'd been in two minds about painting them at all because the figures aren't as good as the dragoons by a long chalk and I was thinking maybe I should just get some Italeri carabiniers instead.

Deliberating on all this I was of course distracted along the way and impulse-bought and painted some HäT Industrie Württemberg cavalry (Jägers) in the two weeks it took me to decide what to do.  These were the first HäT figures I'd painted and I found them quite nice with a lot of well defined detail.  The plastic, although a bit flexible, takes the paint very well.

There are only four poses (12 figures altogether) on three identical sprues in the box (and only two types of horse), but one man on each sprue comes with a choice of arms that you have to glue on.  I made one of them a trumpeter in the vivid yellow coat.  I think the troopers look quite good in their black gauntlets, dark green tunics and yellow trim.

Based up for the WRG 1685-1845 rules on 60mm x 40mm bases, with my usual concoction of coarse sand, painted dark earth then dry brushed in a sandy colour and then flocked, I consider that they've turned out very well.  And I think I'm really getting the hang of painting horses now after my initial hesitations. 

Oh, and finally, here are the cuirassiers. I had two ancient packets of them stashed away and was able to make quite a few bases although whether they'll all get an outing at the same time remains to be seen.

So that's it then, apart from six bases of Italeri French hussars to finish and perhaps one or two more Italeri line infantry regiments (possibly to be painted as Saxons or Swiss, just for a change).

However, I'd really like to get some HäT Württemberg infantry now, as well as the HäT French Guard Chasseurs a Pied, but neither seem to be available in the UK at present.  Still, I could always acquire and paint up some carabiniers in the meantime...