Painting My Way To 1815

The Anglo-Allied infantry, in full, sitting in its storage box.  The only way to paint  20-odd brigades in one go!

The deliveries for the French 1815 army are complete, so it seems only sensible to turn attention back to the progress to date on the initial force: the Anglo-Allied army!  Last time it was shown, I had just gone through all the infantry and painted all the coats the correct colour.  Since then, I have done the trousers.  (Bizarre fact: virtually all of the units have grey trousers, which was something I hadn't picked up on before.  Well, I certainly have noticed it now!)  

To keep myself engaged in a dull moment, I even worked it all out for the number of trousers needed - 300 pairs!  Six-bloody-hundred-legs!  Of that, 200 are now done - all the infantry, leaving only  cavalry and gun crews.  

Next, I have gone onto black paint - which is actually an annoying one.  Coats can be knocked in easily (effectively a base-coat, as you don't need to stay outside straps & cross-belts, as these are best painted over the coat later.)  Trousers, similarly, aren't too bad as long as you don't get a figure with an awkward stance, because they are all one area on the figure - one brush will do for all!  Black is more awkward, mainly because it is for different areas.  Specifically, shoes; packs; cartridge-boxes; bayonets; heads & shakos.  

Instead of doing each set of figures through all these steps to completion in one go (which proved to be very fiddly and slow-moving, thus discouraging) I decided to do all of the various bits one by one.  So, I did all the heads, then all the feet, then all the cartridge-boxes etc.  This might sound like a pretty minor distinction, but I've actually found it very helpful.  I seem to do better at painting when it's just mindless, repetitive stuff you can 'switch off' while you're doing it, or let your thoughts wander to other things.  Having to check over strips of figures to make sure you've not missed a bit, like the end of a cartridge-box visible only from the side, is a bit too demanding of attention. The detailing to pick this up can be done at the very end, when the figures are 'reviewed' just prior to varnishing.

As such I've repeatedly gone through the infantry stack but without it really feeling like a drag.  This is a curious quirk, and also probably explains a lot of why I always struggle most with non-uniform painting jobs where that repetitive style doesn't really fit (this from a man with Confederate infantry and Medieval troops among his collection...)  

After this 'black' process is done, I've moved on through the flesh-coloured paint to do the faces and hands of them all.  At present I'm roughly halfway through painting all the muskets brown.  This actually takes me most of the way through the painting process, as the remaining steps are generally less elaborate and more about local areas - the figures have definitely made their big graduation from 'undercoated figures with a few patches of colour' through to 'painted figures that merely lack a few bits of detailing.'

And for the future, this is the current state of the French army - Still on its sprues, heaped up  on the sink following a dip in some soapy water, to remove any releasing oil from the casting-moulds.

Miniature Review

After a week of rather prompt deliveries from across the UK, the various Amazon/eBay shops have come good.  The full bunch of boxes are here, so I thought that I'd give an example shot of each.

Below is the French Infantry by Italeri (Box 6066.) Italeri actually do two diverging types - the other is 6002 - for French Infantry.  This set is a kind of very realistic 'campaign dress' which is actually at odds with their own box-front artwork.  All the figures, for example, wear trousers as opposed to the gaiters available on the other 6002 set, and thus have less of a 'picturebook' quality to them in exchange for greater realism.

This one is from the Italeri 6016 Imperial General Staff box - I actually got this as a whim, but I'm glad I did.  Featuring Napoleon himself (in Imperial finery, but before he started piling on the pounds in the later years) and an appropriately massive gaggle of hangers-on.  The total is 13 mounted figures and 7 foot generals, so this could furnish you with all the command figures for your own army.

Another Italeri set here, for the cavalry - Dragoons set 6015.  Nicely detailed, and also very dynamic for these troops - the horsetails on the Grecian helmets are all swishing around, about as much as the sword-arms.

Next are the Italeri 6039 set - Polish Lancers: Noooo!!!  I remember these from my childhood when Esci did them.  Seriously, these couldn't have done with an update?  Fair enough if you can't cast the lances on and need them separate, but we could've at least put the bases on the horses, no?  This one promises to be extremely fiddly.

The Zvezda ones are very nice and 'tactile' feeling - by which I mean that there is lots of detail on them, and it's expressed by quite good differentiation over the surface - lots of raised and lowered areas which promise that these should be good ones to paint, especially if you favour inks and washes.  Here is a bit of box 8028, the French Artillery set.  Each box gives three guns, and a very large quantity of limbering teams.  A nice change from the usual, which is to give only guns and crew.

Last, the Zvezda Cuirassiers (box 8037.)  These are given the dramatic 'charging hard at everything' look which most players will want for these elite troops.  One extra observation about Zvezda plastics - they seem to use a more 'rigid' material which feels stronger and more brittle than the plastic usually selected by the likes of Italeri, Revell, Airfix, etc.  I suppose this will be far better for holding paintwork and resisting the odd bump, but with correspondingly higher chances for the odd outstretched arm getting snapped off, should you accidentally catch it on something.

French Army 1815

T'was back in the ancient mists of time (well, July 2011) when I bought the Airfix Waterloo boxed set, and expanded my rediscovery of 1/72 plastics into a brand-new monster-sized project to recreate the campaign of 1815.  Since then I have managed to achieve a fair amount of progress over the last year and a bit.

I have managed to collect all the figures necessary to put and entire Anglo-Allied army on the field, and also a fair proportion of the Prussian army.  I have also managed to launch painting of the entire Anglo-Allied force, with about a dozen bases already completed in prototype form.  
With this progressing so nicely, and the bi-centennial on the way, it's high time to get the opponents sorted out!  

Well, after much planning and searching I've done it.  Napoleon might've needed to escape from Elba, stage a one-man coup to take over France, then run an Imperial bureaucracy to pull together an army for his ambitions, but I find that raising the plastic equivalent requires a far more agreeable afternoon surfing EBay and Amazon for much the same result.  If only he'd known!   

So, to the haul:  my "recruiting efforts" have focused on my favoured Italeri figures, plus some of the excellent-looking sets from Zvezda, which also seem to get high praise online.  The end result, from various sources:

6 boxes of Italeri French Line Infantry
4 boxes of Zvezda French Line Artillery
2 boxes of Italeri French Dragoons
2 boxes of Zvezda French Cuirassiers
1 box of Italeri French Lancers
1 box of Italeri Napoleon's General Staff

This isn't the final, definitive purchase - corps commander miniatures are still needed, plus a few odds and ends of 'specialist' troops of note such as the Imperial Guard, some voltigeur light infantry, and so on.  Nonetheless, the list above breaks the back of the French army collection.  It provides me with a mass of line infantry, plus a weighty spearhead of heavy Cavalry, and also a powerful artillery park which should certainly make Old Boney a ferocious prospect on the tabletop.  

With painting efforts continuing on the Anglo-Allied force, and shortly to commence on the French arrivals, I should be able to start putting on a few small-scale Napoleonic games before very long - before building towards the ultimate objectives of re-enacting the Waterloo campaign as a whole, and also the classic historical battle itself.  

En Avant!

Progress on the Workbench

The Entire Anglo-Allied Force

Waterloo progress of a rather 'dull' sort.  There are generally two ways I approach painting:  
One way is to paint up a unit and complete it, then start another, then another, until it is all finished.  The other way is to paint like a production line, doing the same thing on a whole pile of miniatures (all the coats, all the boots, etc) to bring the whole lot towards completion.


For a fair time, I used to try to always do one or another, and typically wound up feeling guilty when I found myself sacrificing one method for the other.  I have however recently been pondering things and am now much more forgiving of mixing these two methods up.  This is really down to me belatedly recognising that each one has distinct advantages and disadvantages, which vary whatever one is most suitable, depending on the state of the 
project.


Option one is quite good for getting a sense of progress, and correspondingly gives a little boost of enthusiasm - very valuable in a big project, where it's easy to have the initial spark of inspiration begin to wane after a time.  However, seeing a unit through to completion over and over again can also kill off the 'big picture' of a project, and encourages a bit of tunnel vision to creep in.  Also, after seeing a fully-finished unit complete it can be a hard thing to go back to another group of undercoat-only models and start all over again.


Option two is unquestionably faster.  It moves large numbers of figures towards completion in 
a few bold moves, and keeps the whole force moving forward (i.e. cuts off the temptation to dump parts of the project and scale back.)  However, it's painfully thankless for long periods.  Who ever walked away from a painting table after 2-odd hours of work, with precisely no completed figures to show for it, and felt happy?  

Closer view - mainly Cavalry & Artillery

After a bit of pondering (this wasn't some high-minded intellectual musing, I should add - more 
like some daydreaming which went on a bit too long) I decided that the general rule should be the option 2 'production-line' method, but regularly broken up with bursts of 'through to completion' painting to keep enthusiasm high.  I've recently finished a burst of 'option 1' painting which has produced my first try-out bases for all arms of my Napoleonic Waterloo army, and even my first full division of infantry.  However the box of base-coated models on strips of card is alarmingly vast, so I think it's high time that I knuckled down for some 'production-line' painting to try and get all the models with at least the base-colour of their uniforms in place.  

The whole lot

The end result:  behold!  The entire Anglo-Allied army coat-coloured at last, and now only the painful process of doing all the black areas.  Covering heads & shakos, shoes, cartridge boxes, Brit backpacks, bayonet-sheaths & various other straps here and there, it's one of the most infuriating paint-colours to apply.  Still, once this is done it gets progressively easier, I'm happy to remind myself.  

20mm Generals!  Wellington, Orange, Hill & Uxbridge

The finished articles, including some artillery & cavalry I didn't get to photograph before!

Alten's Division, Anglo-Allied Army, 1815

Painting news!  I have limited myself to only painting Waterloo figures, by the simple discipline of putting all my other figures into storage in a relatives' house pre-move.  Here's my first experimental batch for show.  

This group of 3 brigades is for Alten's division in Orange's 1st Corps.  It consists of Halkett's British infantry brigade, Ompteda's KGL brigade, and (in the green) Kielmansegge's Hanoverian brigade.  

I've never been one for basing with a lot of fuss, so I have settled for a simple green spray-painted MDF base with a coat of thin PVA, then flocked with GW grass sprinkled over the top.  It was tried out with the ACW Confederate bases recently, and I thought it looked pretty good.  Plus, these bases have more than 4 figures, so they look much better as they are naturally 'busier.'  (The close-up pic above was taken just after adding the grass, so the figures are still covered in bits and need a bit of a dust-down!)

I've labelled the bases with a written definition on a narrow strip along the back-edge, which turns out to be practical (I considered the underside but had visions of turning over all the bases in a bid to find one rogue unit - far too depressing) and also unobtrusive.  It's visible when you look for it, but if you stand back for the diorama effect, they're effectively invisible from a foot or two away.


I also have some others either done or imminently about to be done.  A Dutch inf unit has been based in a column formation and looks pretty good; an artillery battery has been completed; plus a tester cavalry base has been tried out and they all seem to have gone well.  Infantry are actually the most awkward, just from the number of figures involved.  With a bit more time, I can have a small mixed-arms force to take the field against a similar band, for a little fictitious try-out.

Hobby Plans

My Plans, Yesterday.

I was doing some painting yesterday for my 1815 Plastic 1/72 armies, and decided to time myself.  I like planning progress, but have no idea how long a single unit takes!  Well, now I know - 75 minutes.  One and a quarter hours, to produce a ten-figure unit of infantry.  I was all pleased, until...  Real life intervened.


My flat is sold and now my wife and I have bought a house!  Or more accurately, we have made an offer on one, for a theoretical moving date of the end of June.  From now until then, we have to pack up every single thing we own, for moving day (or M-Day, as I'm inevitably calling it.)  This means that hobby stuff like my models and painting will have to go into the deep-freeze for that time, although hopefully I will ultimately be unpacking them in a brand-new Man-Cave, potentially even with space for my painting and gaming to be permanently set up!  Onwards and Upwards...

The Anglo-Allied Army List

I have, at present, three different sources for Waterloo army lists. First is the original Horse Foot & Guns (DBA-style) rules by Phil Barker which give lists for all three armies; next is the Waterloo Companion book which is far more detailed and complete; and finally there is the Wikipedia page giving the lists for all troops in the campaign. In going through these three even in my own casual style, it's swiftly become clear that nobody quite agrees! Typical...

So, I have gone through it myself and adapted the HFG lists as I feel suitable, to fit with the Waterloo Companion lists which are far more detailed and therefore I suspect as being far more accurate. I imagine the original lists may have been compiled with a balanced 'points total' in mind, but I am not too big on points for wargaming.

Ignoring any historically accurate 'technical' nomenclature, and simply calling all bases 'Brigades':

The list for the Anglo-Allied Army:

The reserve was under Wellington's direct command, so he is listed as the corps command unit here as well as being the army commander. The divisional level has been skipped out here, and troops are generally grouped by nationality.

Brilliant CP - Wellington

Bay[short for Bayonets, i.e. Infantry] (British) - Kempt's Brigade

Bay (Highland) - Pack's Brigade

Bay (British) - Lambert's Brigade

Inferior Bay (Hanoverian Landwehr) - Vincke's Brigade

Inferior Bay (Hanoverian Landwehr) - Best's Brigade

Light Infantry (Brunswick) - Rauschenplatt's Brigade

Bay (Brunswickers) - Specht's Brigade

Bay (Nassauers) - Kruse's Brigade

British Smoothbore Foot Artillery - Drummond

Hanoverian Smoothbore Foot Artillery - Braun

British RHA Smoothbore Horse Artillery - Ross/Beane

Supply Base

Below is the list for the 1st corps - mostly pretty clear-cut, except that the Dutch brigades are in some cases so large they have to be split up. Large brigades with components of a different nationality have been split along these lines to give a chance for recognising the different countries and maintaining a bit of 'colour'.

CP - Orange

Superior Bay (British Guards) - Maitland's Brigade

Superior Bay (British Guards) - Byng's Brigade

Bay (British) - Halkett's Brigade

Bay (KGL) - Ompteda's Brigade

Bay (Hanoverian) - Kielmansegge's Brigade

Bay (Dutch) - Bijlandt's Brigade

Bay (Dutch) - Saxe-Weimar's Brigade (partial)

Bay (Dutch) - Detmers' Brigade

Bay (Dutch) - d'Aubreme's Brigade (partial)

Bay (Belgian) - d'Aubreme's Brigade (partial)

Bay (Nassauer) - Saxe-Weimar's Brigade (partial)

British Smoothbore Foot Artillery - Adye/Williamson

Dutch Smoothbore Foot Artillery - Opstal

Dutch Smoothbore Foot Artillery - Smissen

Next, 2nd Corps. There are some modifications here. The original list by Phil Barker gave two bases of KGL Bayonets while I could only identify one brigade, and seemed to skip Lyon's brigade out. The Waterloo companion listed Lyon as being a brigade of Hanoverian Landwehr, so I decided to switch the second KGL unit of Bayonets to Hanoverian Landwehr and use them to represent Lyon's Brigade. As done elsewhere, I listed the Landwehr as 'Inferior' quality.

Identifying the Light Infantry was also a bit awkward. I went in the end for Mitchell's brigade, which did at least contain a regiment listed as light infantry. The other one was pretty easy to

guess as Adam's Brigade as it contained the famous '95th Rifles' of the Sharpe novels. Adam also got represented by a second base of regular Brit Bayonets however, as it contained the 52nd Regiment - noted as the numerically strongest unit in the army, and therefore well worth

representing with another base.

CP - Hill

Superior Light Infantry (British Rifles) - Adam's Brigade (partial)

Superior Light Infsntry (British) - Mitchell's Brigade

Bay (KGL) - Du Platt's Brigade

Inferior Bay (Hanoverian Landwehr) - Lyon's Brigade

Inferior Bay (Hanoverian Landwehr) - Halkett's Brigade

Bay (British) - Johnstone's Brigade

Bay (British) - Adam's Brigade (partial)

Light Inf (Dutch) - Anthing's Brigade

Inferior Bay (Dutch Militia) - de Eerens' Brigade

Inferior Bay (Dutch Militia) - d'Hauw's Brigade

British Smoothbore Foot Artillery - Gold/Hawker

Dutch Smoothbore Foot Artillery - Wijnands

Dutch Smoothbore Foot Artillery - Riesz

The Cavalry Corps got listed by Phil Barker as having two fewer units of cavalry than I could find brigades listed. So, I simply added them in! Not sure exactly which ones got skipped, but the two British Light Cavalry bases I added got tentatively identified as Vivian's & Arendschildt's brigades.

CP - Uxbridge

Superior British Heavy Cav (Household) - Somerset

British Heavy Cav (Union Brigade) - Ponsonby

Inferior Dutch Heavy Cav (Carabiniers) - Trip

British Light Cav (Hussars) - Grant

KGL Light Cav (Hussars) - Dornberg

British Light Cav (Lt Dragoons) - Vandaleur

Hanoverian Light Cav (Hussars) - Estorff

Dutch Light Cav - Ghigny

Dutch Light Cav - Merlen

British Light Cav (Hussars) - Vivian

British Light Cav - Arentsschildt

British RHA Smoothbore Horse Artillery - Bull/Webber-Smith/Gardiner

British RHA Smoothbore Horse Artillery - Whinyates/Ramsay/Mercer

Dutch Smoothbore Horse Artillery - Petter/Pittius

So, no small amount of work there for 2012!

The Anglo-Allied Army

Good news! The Anglo-Allied Army is indeed adequately represented! Here is another photo, identical to the one above, showing the figures dealt out to each base.

After lots of snipping figures off sprues, I now have enough for each base. Looking at them all in one go, some things stand out. Specifically, the variation in Quality! Revell are good but a touch thin and elongated; Airfix are strangely mis-shapen; Mars appear to not use plastic at all, but rather some strange substance closer to old chewing-gum than anything else; HaT are good and generally more 'uniform' in pose than anything else. The two stand-out facts are a) Italeri are easily the best quality, and b) there really is no excuse these days to not mould a horse and its base as a single unit (you hear that Airfix, Mars and Esci? We all hate trying to fix some horse's leg into a tiny slot!)

Next up, the job of slowly glueing each set of figures to a strip of cardboard!

Anglo-Allied Stock-taking

I thought I'd just write this up as I go, as I'll probably not get round to it at a later date. Here is, with photos, my attempt to sort out the entire Anglo-Allied Waterloo Campaign army with my plastic purchases!

The 'plastic mountain' in it's full horror/glory. The Anglo-Allied army, because of the variety of unit types it seems to have contained, required the most box-buying of plastics. Now I should be in a good situation to completely, or very nearly, model the whole thing!

Manufacturers are a mad combination of whatever I was able to get my hands on. As a rough rule of thumb, the ones for Italieri & Revell seem to be generally best quality, while Airfix are the most variable. Luck of the draw, really! However, there are sites available which you really can't do without.

On a similar note, what do they all look like? Well, there's another site which I have turned to and it has supplied me with ludicrous levels of information. Generally, for each base/brigade, I have looked up the largest or most notable unit contained within it, and used its uniform as representative. Now, to the plan:

These square bits of card are the 6cm x 6cm bases I intend to use. The four broad columns are, left to right, Orange's I Corps, then Hill's II Corps, Uxbridge's Cavalry Corps and Wellington's Reserve Corps. Roughly each base is a brigade, and it's broadly as per the Horse Foot & Guns army-list, but I have tinkered slightly based on reading through my book 'The Waterloo Companion'. You'll see that some bases have had some figures placed on them - these are the ones which I have taken off their sprues, & base-coat sprayed with plastikote as a test-attempt. Now I'm ready to go Industrial-Scale, and do as many of the rest as I can!

One point of interest, however, on plastic figures: I usually mount figures onto wooden ice-lolly sticks, but the smooth base of the plastics is not as rough as lead-cast figures' bases usually are. Figures I tried here to glue to wooden sticks simply snapped off with barely a touch, but strips of cardboard (from a cut-up cereal box) seem to be much more effective! Plus, you can be much more liberal with the glue - if you're fighting to get them off later, card can be cut away simply enough while a little wooden stick would probably be more resistant than your soft-plastic figures were!

More updates as I progress...

Napoleonic Progress

Good News on the painting front, as I have my first shot at painting a unit completed - I've painted up a base of British Infantry, just to try things out and get my eye back in (last time I painted plastic Napoleonics would have been probably in the very early 1990s, and that was quite a while ago! Still, it's good fun and I liked the end result. The figures here are painted and washed with Devlan Mud, giving them a bit of shadowing. I plan to matt-varnish them and then base them. The learning curve is also continuing, as I have been reminded that glueing the plastic figures onto lolly sticks to paint them is not exactly like doing so with lead figures. The plastic figures' bases are too perfectly smooth, so the clue doesn't hold them - most of the ones shown here simply popped off when I tried to paint them! I shall score the underside of the figures before I try and fix them to a permanent base.

Ah yes, the bases. I got a good comment from Jim on my last post, when I trotted out my first guess at base sizes. Sensibly, Jim suggested using 60mm x 60mm square bases for everything, and I quickly realised this was an excellent notion. (You see, I don't do this blog to share all my efforts: I just do it so the wargaming community at large can save me from my own blunders!) :-)

Anyway, the photo above shows a 60mm square infantry base with some figures arranged on it. Taking advantage of the larger base, I can even depict the infantry in varying formations! Shown above (with some Highlander figures, but we'll just skip that for now) is a possible 'Column' formation of a 4-man row at the front, backed by a second and third rank of three men in each. This still leaves loads of room around for safety's sake to prevent figure-bumping, and lets those troops who habitually fought with 'columnar tactics' get a better showing. Likewise, I'll place formed Light Infantry further back on their bases, and put a big skirmisher screen to the front for them.

There's also been a bit of card base-cutting going on. This monster-stack above represents all the bases needed to represent the Anglo-Allied army, in its entirety. 53-odd bases in total, I believe, excluding Supply Camps and Command Parties. (Flippin' heck, this really is a big project I seem to have somehow blundered into...)

Plastics begin to Arrive

At this early stage of gathering plastic 1/72 figures, the list of required boxes is such that frankly, at the moment I can start gathering however I like - all milestones are too far off to achieve in one swift leap! I had pondered doing all the combined Artillery, or maybe just the Prussian army, etc. but I decided against it. I'm just nabbing things here and there for the time being, letting the stockpile grow organically. The long delivery times required for ebay items also acts as a bit of a brake on things, which is probably just as well.

Following on from my Waterloo Airfix diorama box, the first ebay purchases have turned up. First and foremost, I have received a bulk-lot of a dozen boxes of Revell Napoleonic miniatures that some nice guy was selling on ebay. I now have:

2 boxes of French Grenadiers (in greatcoats, somewhat unfortunately)

2 boxes of French Mounted Guard Chasseurs (natty cavalry, with big bearskins)

3 boxes of British Line Infantry (Belgic shako, the 'classic' Brit redcoats!)

1 box of Prussian Infantry (Line Prussians, with the shako)

2 boxes of British Life Guards Cavalry (plumed Grecian-style helmets, so hopefully useful 'heavy cavalry' for some other nations - Dutch Carabiniers, perhaps?)

2 boxes of British Foot Artillery

Overall, the Revell figure quality seems to be noticeably superior to the Airfix versions, as plasticsoldierreview.com predicted. In addition to this I have received another ebay order:

3 boxes of Prussian Infantry from Italieri. These seem to also be of high detail quality, although the Italieri figures are an infantry mix - no distinction between Line and Landwehr, so I'll need to go through them and sort them.

A good couple of bases' worth are already in hand, and more are due to arrive soon (in the form of Prussian Artillery by HaT, I believe). I can begin painting a few in a short while, so I have started looking over the arrived miniatures and assessing what base-scale I want.

Rules-wise, I am pretty keen on giving the DBA-esque 'Horse, Foot & Guns' a try. It has the classic DBA virtues of speedy play, meaning the Waterloo campaign could conceivably be knocked off in a weekend's worth of play, preventing a long bogged-down campaign.

Another option is of course to use the 'Black Powder' rules I typically use in my Seven Years' War games. They include a lot of Napoleonic 'colour' through their special rules, although the single-base-per-unit situation is a bit more awkward with them.

For basing flexibility, ideally, I should have two bases per infantry unit so I can represent formations. Side by side would give a Line formation, one behind the other for a Column, and back-to-back for a Square. Only march columns and skirmish screens would require more detailed basing if I really felt compelled to represent them, so it's a pretty decent option for future expansion. Initial checks quickly reveal the difficulty with this, however - great variability of manufacturers' footprints for the figures. Where do you literally draw the line for splitting a base, when it's practically guaranteed that some bases won't fit the measurement?

For now I've decided, following much pondering in my bunker, to stick with a single-base stuffed with figures. I will be fixing them to a card base so that future remounting is at least a possibility, which MDF rather rules out in my experience. I also have the minor matter of keeping costs down, and buying a huge board of good-quality card to chop up is still far better than lots of differently-sized pre-cut MDF bases.

Next up: basing sizes!

Waterloo Box

The first bits of the Waterloo plastic armies have arrived! The Airfix box was indeed a good starter-set as I have bagged a bunch of odd-figures such as Highland infantry, Royal Horse Artillery, and British Hussars in dandy bearskins. The quality on some is a little variable, with the French Foot artillery in particular looking a little cartoonish in their proportions, but this is something I had been tipped to expect by plasticsoldierreview.

I'll list The full contents of the box, incidentally, as I couldn't find details online anywhere else. They are as follows:

1 Model farmhouse

1 diorama base, in two separate sheets

1 sprue of 48 Highlander Infantry

1 sprue of 48 British Line Infantry (Belgic Shakos)

1 sprue of Royal Horse Artillery, consisting of 2 cannon and a limber.

1 sprue of British Cavalry (Hussars, with bearskins)

1 sprue of French Grenadiers

1 sprue of French Line Infantry

1 sprue of French Cavalry (wearing Grecian helmets, who look like Dragoons or similar medium-ish cavalry)

1 sprue of French Foot Artillery consisting of 3 guns

1 sprue of Prussian Infantry (Landwehr, by the looks of 'em)

1 sprue of Farmyard equipment such as a farmer's wagon, timber barricades, sacks of equipment, etc.

As you'll see, you only ever get 1 sprue of each, so it's a bit of a taster box rather than anything else. A Good all-round starting point, as far as I'm concerned! The farm will also be handy for my gaming in general, as a mid-European farm can be used in a couple of the periods I game. The diorama base is pretty much useless to my plans, however. Shame, as it would probably look quite nice if painted and grassed. The farm equipment is a bit of a random addition, but I'll make good use of it to create an army's Supply base for its rear (basically doing the same job as the 'Camp' stand in DBA.)

First Plastic Steps

My usual method of ordering an army is to work it out in full, prepare an order, then place it in one bulk order (broken into 2 or 3 if it's a large project.) I always end up using a single manufacturer, rarely mix in other odds & ends, and generally keep the whole business as quick & clean as possible. The new 'Plastic Waterloo' project has broken new ground already, as I'm not doing this at all.

Instead of buying the lot from one place I'm picking up odd boxes here and there, wherever I can find them. I'm actually discovering the "collectors' side" of the hobby, which I've never bothered with before now - the challenge of hunting down the desired models and picking them up from obscure online shops, internet ebay auctions, and so on. The whole thing feels like a breath of fresh air - a mad hunt high and low to obtain that crucial last box of Zvezda French Napoleonic Line Artillery, where online listings need to be prowled every day. Strangely exciting, in an admittedly very nerdy way.

The master-plan is in place, at least. I've become best friends with the website Plasticsoldierreview.com for it's (splendid) catalogue of online photos & reviews about what each box contains. Frequently they're better than the manufacturers' own website!

The first steps have already been taken, and frankly I've already been convinced of the financial sense of the move. My first purchase was the Airfix Waterloo Diorama Box Set, which seems to contain four-hundred-odd figures of great use, plus a model farm-house - all a spectacular bag for just £20! I had spotted it in the Glasgow branch of Hamleys, but it is also available at this sale price from the Airfix website direct (oddly, other sites such as Amazon are still selling it at the full £35 price, so searching around has already paid benefits.)

Next up, I had a look on ebay and discovered that as well as individual boxes, folk also put up collections of several boxes at once. One I found a day or two ago which was coming to a halt for a pile of twelve Revell boxes, all Waterloo-relevant figures like British/Prussian/French Foot, Cavalry, Artillery, etc. I reasoned that this would be cheaper than buying individually, so plonked in a bid. While wandering around in the supermarket in my lunch-break yesterday, I got the email on my phone telling me I had won the lot! Although the exact number of figures is a little vague (do you count Artillery guns as one model? several? None?) but there's no denying the fact I seem to have gotten a real bargain. From my initial calculations, I believe I have gotten practically all my British Infantry for the price of roughly 10p per figure! Try that in lead at the closest scale (20mm to 25mm?) and you're probably talking ten times that price.

Once these packages are delivered, the next big challenge will be to track down some of the more awkward customers - things like Artillery, and some of the more obscure infantry. Once the Airfix Waterloo box arrives, I'll also be able to finalise my 'Target List' of what's required.

Plastic Fantastic

My last post brought two nice comments from Ray and Jim, so I thought I'd start by saying a big "Thanks!" to them both. Normally I just add a comment of my own to say ta, but I'm in such a positive mood I thought I'd start by just saying hi in the next post. More WotR stuff is coming shortly, including the next stage of my refight of the Wars (yes, I finally have enough figures painted to launch into that again!) For now though, something totally different...

Further progress from the usual chin-stroking about what big project to pick up next, and an unexpected one has turned up (isn't it always the way?) I had been pondering an attempt to make the Waterloo Campaign in miniature, largely inspired from reading over the old 'Horse Foot & Guns' rules (by Richard Bodley Scott) that I used to use, based on the DBA system but extending them into the horse & Musket period. The Army lists he produced are actually very precise for the 100-days' campaign, listing the entirety of the French, Prussian and Anglo-Allied armies. As ever with some project with a definite 'maximum size' feature, I found myself drawn to it.

Next up was the purchase off Amazon at knock-down price of the massive hardback book 'The Waterloo Companion' by Mark Adkin. This proved to have even more interest and info (although just of the titular battle, not the entire 4-day campaign) which worsened things. I began to plan out how I could buy the miniatures.

They're not small armies, and quite varied & eclectic in the case of Wellington's lot. As the only thing more involving than painting an army is organising your purchases to start painting an army, I found myself sinking into an ever-increasingly complicated pile of spreadsheets, price lists, packaging systems, manufacturers, and scales.

Ah, scales. What a headache that is in itself! I could do it in 2mm, and be super-realistic. I could do it in 6mm and get scale and detail, or I could go into 15mm and get a bit more abstracted, going for the DBA 4-figures-representing-a-brigade style of basing. I pondered. A lot.

I don't know if other gamers out there have the same experience, but if I spend ages examining and planning something, there can come a point where you hit a wall. Then, if some new idea occurs, it can blow the whole thing up into the air again and make you look at the whole thing afresh. I was very nearly settled on 6mm as the scale of choice, giving the best balance between visually pleasing end-results and not bankrupting myself along the way. Then, another dark-horse option turned up. In my case, it turned out to be plastic figures.

I remember these 1:72 cheap, flexible plastic figures with some personal nostalgia, as they were my very first wargame models. From the local toy shop I would get boxes of figures (Italieri/Esci/ERTL as I recall) and I bought pretty much one of each, as back then I saw no point in wasting pocket money buying two of the same thing, and balanced force-composition wasn't my thing. I had various mixes of them, such as a box of Romans and a box of barbarians (lots of red paint on the axe-blades, I believe!); Colonial British and the Zulus , who I recall also had spears & shields which were maddeningly easy to knock off (gluing them never occurred, surprisingly!) Centre of the whole collection however were the Napoleonic figures, probably mostly through availability. Like no other set, I could get an entire all-arms army as they sold Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery.

My first proper 'Army' for wargames was Waterloo British infantry who would form square to face off against the French Grenadiers in Column (no, I didn't understand the tactical formations either) and probably amounted in total to:

British Infantry, which was about 2/3rds English and 1/3rd Highlander dress

Cavalry - Scots Greys, all of it. (The shop never stocked another type, so I thought the cavalry was 100% uniformed like this)

Artillery - All Royal Horse Artillery, with the natty little Tarleton helmet. No Foot Artillery, of course.

French Grenadiers - No common 'Line' troops here, which probably meant Napoleon had to annihilate the bear-population of Europe to equip his armies with headgear.

Cavalry - roughly 50% Cuirassiers and 50% Lancers. In a rare example of branching out, I bought two boxes of French Cavalry, probably because I judged Lancers as sufficiently 'different' to matter.

Artillery - All Old Guard bearskins yet again, and annoyingly through a packaging decision two guns were 12lb 'proper' cannons while the other two were 'broken' cannon with short howitzer barrels (I had no idea what they were.)

From this in auspicious and long-gone beginning, can I build something like a decent army to take to the wargames field? There's no arguing with the beast in question as all the pros and cons have been rehearsed at great length elsewhere. They're soft plastic, paint flakes off, they mould poorly, the poses are all over the shop (and sometimes ludicrously weird), etc. etc. etc. However, there's no arguing with the fact that you get 50 a box, and a box can cost around a fiver. There's just no arguing with that! The only question is where the hell to buy them so I am currently searching in to the weirder corners of the web on Ebay and so on, trying to track down anywhere that deals in them these days. A far cry from my normal one-stop shop method where the list is definitively worked out before I place the order!