Russian Headquarters

I've just finished the first part of a long awaited project of mine, napoleonic personalities and headquarters. These here are the russian Headquarters, and amongst them, a lot of personalities.

Strelets has done a handful of command models for each major power of the napoleonic wars, often combined in sets of 2 nations (British and Austrian; Russian and Prussian). The french received 2 full kits of personalities.

Those kits are currently out of production, but most can still be found quite often on ebay. I managed to grab one of each, including the very rare dismounted french staff, which cost me a small fortune (!).

No set has more historical personalities than the russian one, which is understandable, given that Strelets is a russian company. These russians are some of the best sculpted headquarters from Strelets' adventure into that venue. 

I put (mostly) one personality per base, and named each for easy reference. I used a handful of other models from Zvezda, Hat and Italeri to help "set the scene" of each command base.

Finally, the Tsar. Note the pavlovski grenadier on the back. It's a conversion I did using an Italeri head on a Zvezda body, to create a late war uniformed grenadier of that regiment. Now that I see that it works and looks perfect, I'll be doing a full battalion of those corverts in the near future -I realised I have enough Italeri heads to execute such project.

The Tsar is accompanied by the Quartermaster Volkonsky.

A base on an asteroid

I was working on the backyard garden the other day and stumbled on this rock. I immediatelly envisoned it as a nice piece for conversion into an asteroid, so I went over my collection of bits to find what would work as surface facilities to be installed on it.

I based it on an Corsec Engineering Omnibase, and did some "terraforming" to create suitably plain areas where to install the facilities.

Here it is alongside a Ground Zero Games NSL ship, to give a sense of its size:

I definitely need to get some spaceships games going again, my collection of fleets have been undisturbed for quite too long.

Russian Horse Artillery

Given the lack of options for russian horse artillery in plastics 1/72, I endevoured to find another solution to complete my artillery, and came across these fellows, in resin, so I purchased 6 kits - 2 batteries' worth of guns.

This is definitely not the best material for this scale, due to it's fragility, a few bits snapped during assembly and/or painting, but I managed to glue them back without much trouble. My hope is that, being artillery, mounted on large bases, they'll be durable enough since, as usual for my 1/72, there will be no touching the minis proper once they're finished and based - all handling is done from their bases.

A couple excessively fragile items, such as the ramming rods, which were very thin, I substituted for some plastic ones I had on spares. Also a couple guns, just because I had some left in plastic, and I trust them better than resin.

The models are well sculpted, but a bit on the larger side - on par with Italeri's 1/72, I'd say.

Their helmets come with early war crests, which is the best option, since you can (as I did) trim them into late war style if that suits you better.

And here they are alongside my recently painted horse artillery limber, which featured here on the blog a couple posts ago. I now have 1 limber for every battery of russian artillery (whether foot or horse), which will be my standard for all other armies.

French Young Guard

I've finished the first half of my planned french young guard brigade - 2 battalions. I'll be painting another 2 battalions early next year.

These are Hat Industries models, the first napoleonic troops I've painted in greatcoats, and how fast they paint up!

The fanions were hand painted, to a design I found online - since it seems these troops had no regulation design.

I also made 4 bases of skirmishers, enough to represent the mixed formation of a single unit. I'll do another 4 skirmish bases along with the next 2 battalions, so I can field the brigade with the 2 battalions in the front supported by their own screen of skirmishers.

Russian artillery limbers

Here are several new limbers for my artillery batteries. These first two are gun limbers, the drivers being from the Zvezda artillery set, and the limbers proper from the Hat french limber set.

These two below are ammunition caissons, everything from the Zvezda russian artillery set.

Last, the horse artillery limbers, again using limbers from the french kit from Hat Industries. The drivers are Hat russian dragoons, with their crests properly trimmed to represent late war uniforms. Their swords were also trimmed, twisted and painted as to represent lashes, and their poses suggest the limber is in full gallop!

The horse artillery guns and crew is subject of another post. I managed to find a good option in resin, since there is none in plastic 1/72, and they're are currently on the queue for a chance to get painted.