French Marshalls and High Staff - Part II

Here is the second part of my post about the French Marshalls:



















A few unnamed command bases, representing anonymous commanders:

This one below was supposed to be Ney, according to the description on the Strelets box, but since I already had a mounted version of him, I chose to use this model to represent an unidentified Marshall, so I can use him as any Marshall I happen to need, for which I don't have a specific command base.

Same with this one below, which should be Bessieres, but I already painted a dismounted version of him, so this one here will be another anonymous Marshall for when I need one.

I like this model of the surgeon, which allowed me to paint something I don't usually do in Napoleonics. I almost never paint blood on my napoelonics, I like to keep the appearence of actual war, pain and suffering away from my armies - this is supposed to be fun, I don't want to be constantly reminded of the gruesome nature of reality. Still, in this case I thought it'd be too unrealistic if a surgeon had no blood stains on his apron!

This one below was actually a dismounted version of Davout. Since I chose to paint the mounted version of him, and his features are too characteristic to simply be painted as somebody else, I instead converted the model, using a head from another sculpt in the set, to come up with another unnamed Marshall.

For those wondering about my Napoleon, I already had one, from Italeri, which is a better sculpt than those of Strelets, which where too cartoony, with excessively oversized heads, so I stick with my original Emperor:

French Marshalls and High Staff - Part I

I took me a while to get my hands on both kits of Napoleon's General Staff, from Strelets. These are out of production, quite rare, and their prices can go a bit high on ebay when they eventually show up there.

They're mostly nice sculpts, with an odd model here and there bearing an excessively oversized head, but the majority of models are good enough for my standards, and are a very needed addition to my collection, given my scarcity of command bases for my french army.

With these, I have 18 more command bases for this army (in addition to my previous 6), enough to play even the most epic battles of Black Powder I could think of!

By the way, Strelets has announced they'll be producing a new set of Napoleon's General Staff, and given how much better their recent sculpts have been, I'm looking forward to such set, and will most likely be adding those to my collection as well!

So, here are my generals. I'm splitting this post in 2 parts, so I can show individual pics of each base without making an exorbitantly long post.

As I have done with other armies, I've tagged some of the bases with names of the personalities they represent. I1ve also used models of other manufactors, such as Hat and Italeri to help "populate" the bases and set the scene.

Most of the horses of the original Strelets boxes I replaced with others from Hat - the Strelets horses from these sets were generally far too poor!

Continue on French Marshalls and High Staff - Part II

British Infantry on parade

I've spent most of February working on my british infantry, not only to make the 2 battalions I showed here on previous posts, but also because I took the opportunity to work on my existing battalions as well, to correct some imperfections - they're among my first painted units of napoleonics, and I've learned a thing or two about correct regulations since then.

I had 6 battalions of line and 1 of light infantry, but they were mostly incorrect regarding their flank companies, some had too many grenadiers/light, some had too few. Also, none had standard bearers, and most had scarce command figures. So, there was a lot of work involved to fix all that.

Here we can see the result, with all my current battalions on parade (including the 2 newly finished). I don't have enough poles to give each battalion 2 flags - as I mentioned on other post, the Hat Command kit is quite rare - so I chose to give one each, with some carrying the regiment colors and others carrying the King's. This way I get a got mixed visual on the battlefield.

My units are 32-men strong. The flank companies (grenadiers on the rigth, lights on the left) should each compose 1/6 of the unit, so I round that up to 6 models for each flank company. Fixing the proportions of these men involved most of the work required to correct my battalions, not only with painting new models, but also removing and gluing, and redoing the texture on the bases once the new models were in place. It was labor intensive, alright, but the result is very nice.

I also added a drummer to each battalion, and in some cases a bugler and/or fifer. The light infantry battalion is the one that received most additions - they only had a officer to represent their command party, so I added a bugler, drummer, color bearer and fifer. 

I also gave it a new officer - the one from the Command kit is a better sculpt than the original from the light infantry kit, though I wonder if it's correct to give a officer in a bicorn to a light infantry unit - I haven't seen any visual reference on that, but I haven't found anything that says they should only wear shakos, either, so I guess at least for the peninsular campaign it should be correct.

I plan to add another 3 units to this army, with at least one of them being a second light infantry battalion. This would give me a total of 12 british battalions, which, together with my portuguese, spanish and brunswickers would make for quite a large force to face the french in peninsular battles in our games of Black Powder.