The Day of Paint

Hooray! Yesterday (Monday) was a very successful day off to 'work' all day at hobby painting. I spent the day doing nothing but working on my Perry Miniatures 'Wars of the Roses' figures, and by virtue of concentrating all efforts on this, I've managed to make some strides forward!

To recap, I have a massive 'to do' pile of 32 bases (10 figures a base, so 320 figures - just for the regular bow-and-bill units.) I have 11 bases done already, which I showed off earlier as my Basic Impetus Yorkist army. So, 21 bases to go!

There's two approached to painting a large project, I find: break it up into small nibbles and fully complete a section at a time; or do the whole thing as a mammoth one-off and try to do the whole thing in one batch. I find the first method is best at the early stages, just to avoid getting discouraged. Towards the middle stage of a project, I find that it can actually get worse as one completed 'chunk' goes away and gets replaced by yet another identical 'chunk'. After a while, it's good to switch to a huge pile, so you can see the entire thing and think 'yes, it's a lot to do, but once this is done, that's it!' My WOTR project is now at that stage, thankfully!

I have been painting away at all the un-showy, laborious and off-putting jobs, which have now been swept out of the way. Specifically:

Green bases - never again shall a paintbrush undercoat the lush grasses of Medieval England for these guys!

Steel - all arrowheads, sword hilts, bills, sallets and plate armour are done. Blacksmiths across England have filed for bankruptcy!

Flesh - the hands and faces are done, meaning that when the police investigate the aftermath of a battle, the photofit people will at least have somewhere to start. (Assuming the 15th century had the photofit. Or the police.)

This metaphor is getting even weirder.

The end result of this dull-but-worthy painting is that I'm now on the downhill - only materials like liveries, leggings, etc. remain, plus some detailing on belts, etc. Then it's all done, save for the dip/varnish finish!

There's a plan in place...

Just a brief post here, to say I'm underway with a quick-fix bit of gaming (board game, as it happens - I'll post the narrative sometime soon.) However the main update is that I have arranged for the next Monday to be a day off work, and I intend to spend it on a massive painting binge for my Wars of the Roses figures. Hopefully I can get a big bound forward with them by devoting an entire day to it!

Gaming Quick-Fix Options

Thinks have been a bit quiet here on the wargaming front. I've been dividing my attentions between the Wars of the Roses figures and the growing Waterloo Plastics project. I need something that's a bit more of a 'quick hit' for a gaming fix. I've done a little towards this with my old stand-by option of my Seven Years' War collection, which I've launched into a little mini-campaign with (I'll spare you the full details as they're on my other blog) In any case, it's proven a nice refresher.

So, what else is there? As ever, I'm long on ideas but short on resources (money, and particularly time.) So I have to fall back on what I already have or something I can do with only counters or something similar I can make easily enough.

I aim to continue with the other two, and root around for something else. I was wondering though if any other wargamers have come up with an ingenious solution to this sort of quick-fix problem, where every project threatens to be a monster-sized epic, and nothing can get done in the here-and-now?

Prussian Guns

The final outstanding arrival has turned up - two boxes of HaT Napoleonic Prussian Artillery. These ones were quite difficult to find, and I wound up ordering from America through ebay International. Fine service, although shipping took quite a time (obviously) and also the box was battered & squashed (thanks, postman!) Thankfully the packing the sender used, plus the soft & flexible plastic fo the figures themselves, meant these guys were practically indestructible. Only the boxes got a bit crumpled!

Now I can get on with some serious painting - there's not been too much model-painting recently, sadly, as I had a bit of a DIY disaster here and most brush-wielding efforts have been directed at the walls of the flat! Still, I'm hoping to get some work done this coming weekend - and possibly even a game!

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...)

Bases for the New Napoleonic Plastics

Here are a few basic experiments with basing, and my initial thoughts. I've taken some of the Airfix figures to try with this, as they seem to have the greatest variance in base-size. Plus, it also lets me take a break from posting endless lists of boxes, and put some pictures up for a change!

I am basically sticking with the 'Horse, Foot & Guns' ruleset for basing, and I have plumped for a 60mm frontage. A single Base-width in HFG is scaled as about 300 metres in the 'real world', so this means a manageable tabletop distance of slightly over a foot (32cm) being equivalent to a mile (roughly 1600m.) Nice! It also proves handy as a decent size to fit 4 horsemen onto a base, which is a nice number - 3 looks too sparse, while 5 is a bit of a crush!

The above pic is of some of the French Heavy Cavalry, and I've used some spare bits of card to frame-out a base 6cm wide by 4.5cm deep - keeping base-depth in scale with width, as per the usual DBA norms. Airfux cavalry seem to have unusually big bases, like a big splodge of chewing-gum. I may have to clip a few when I glue them down to a base, but overall, the riders themselves look decently spaced out.

Next up, some artillery. These fit very nicely onto a 6cm by 6cm square base, giving room for a single cannon and a crew to stand around it without looking too cramped for room. With these two, the next question was about Infantry - could I get 8 or 10 figures to a base?

The answer, it turns out, is ten - even with the random footprints of Airfix. This base is 6cm by 3cm in size, which takes a nice double-rank of ten figures, two ranks of five. Airfix also seem to have no real uniformity in poses in a figure set - others appear to standardise a lot more but I've been certain from the word go that I'd need to have mixed poses on a base, so it's not a problem!

Relating to the difference between 8-figure and 10-figure bases, or even the possible double-base option in future for Black Powder, I think I'm safe plumping for 10 figures a base as the cost difference is negligible and availability of infantry boxes appears good. Plus, frankly, I think it looks good!

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!