French Light Infantry

I recently finished painting what remained to do of my french light infantry. I already had Carabiniers and Voltigeurs, distributed in 3 regiments, but no Chasseurs.

Given the Chasseurs are the main elements of the light infantry regiments, I needed a lot to rearrange my light units, in realistic proportions. So I set to paint a hundred such models, from the excellent Hat Industries kits of Marching, Advancing and Command Chasseurs.

Once the Chasseurs were done, I had to also remove a lot of the Carabiniers and Voltigeurs from their stands to rebase them as skirmishers, making space on the regiments for the Chasseurs. All models combined, I had enough to come up with 5 regiments of light infantry, with realistic relative numbers of chasseurs, carabiniers and voltiguers - because my units comprise 32 models, a sixth of that would be 5.3, so I chose to use 6 models each for both elite companies, with the remaining ranks filled with Chasseurs.

The work was not done there, for I also decided to give my original carabiniers and voltiguers a controlled layer of dark wash on their blue coats, to bring the blue to a darker tone - it was bothering me that my french infantry was looking a bit too light. I'll be using the same technique on the rest of my french army, so in time they'll all be looking darker, to the shade this guys here are showing.

Not only that, I also had to correct the color of the turnbacks on my carabiniers. I realised I got them wrong - they were painted solid red, when they should have been blue piped white, like the rest of the light infantry.

The Chasseur Command set provided 4 standard bearers, so I decided to make use of them and add colors to my regiments (4 of the 5, at least). 

When I started doing Napoleonics, I didn't bother much with flags, but they have been growing on me as of late, and I can see the appeal of beautifully adorned flags. I'm confident my troops morale will show remarkable improvement, now they have colors and eagle to fight for!

So much I liked adding flags to these fellows, I'm planing on doing the same accross my armies. I'll be adding flags to those already painted and those to come in a regular basis now.

With the voltigeurs and carabiniers I removed from formed ranks I had enough models to come up with plenty of skirmishers, which will prove useful in deploying screens in front of my brigades: