Monday, August 17, 2015

Behold an update! The Coalition!

Part II of the Behold an Update! series of updates. The author makes a hasty post before disappearing back into his man-cave once more, never to be seen.

I've decided what to do for my "Coalition" (ie non-French) army.

I have settled with a Austro-Bavarian Corps, but with the addition of a British brigade to spice things up. While in the beginning, painting white was incredibly tedious, the Austrians have slowly grown on me, but I didnt want to just paint white all the time either, and needing a little "oooo shiney" battalions here and there, decided to spice things up by adding the colorful Bavarians and a British brigade (consisting of two British line infantry battalions, and two Hanovarian Landwehr battalions).





Currently its essentially a small division with two unfinished brigades. In one, I have 2 Hungarian infantry regiments, a Jager battalion, and some cavalry (Hussar and Uhlan regiment), and the other consists of a Grenz battalion, and two German infantry battalions.




Still left to do:

2 German Infantry battalions
1 Grenz battalion
Artillery
Bavarian brigade (4 infantry battalions, artillery battery)
British/Hanovarian brigade






Most of the work in this Army of the Coalition (of the willing) is still not done, but I hope to have plenty of time during my business trip to get some more done. Looking forward to painting the Bavarians though, as the colors are very different to the standard Austrian white! Even the British were quite fun to paint... other than the flags that were a massive pain :(

Behold an update! The French!

Here, the blog owner appears from his man-cave to unveil the scribbling he has made upon bits of metal.....


It's true that I've been gone, but I've also been hard at work (painting)! Really!  There's been talk with my co-author of the blog to see if we can create a website to better organize our projects, but I'm waiting to see what he has in mind.

In the meanwhile.... my paint brushes have been furiously at work. Speaking of paintbrush, I did try out one of those Windsor & Newton brushes at 00 / 000 size that people have been talking about on various blogs. They're definitely quite something else - but there's this bizarre fear within me about "wasting" these brushes, and would rather use the Citadel Fine Detail brushes. It's irrational, I know. But even if the Citadel brushes lose their tips after a few months of furious painting, I still like them. All habits die hard.


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I did make a post on the Pendraken forums regarding my work with miniatures, but out of respect to the guys there, I try not to link non-Pendraken products. Whereas Battlefront have straight out and went ahead to ban / delete threads that contain non-Battlefront 15mm WWII products, I find their way of doing it rather insulting, in a way. Pendraken don't have that policy, even if their annual painting competition disallows non-Pendraken products - but the reasons behind that are a matter of common sense.


The current "French Army" in its "complete" form. At the moment it's divided into three brigades:
First Brigade, consisting of 6 infantry battalions and reinforced with 2 artillery batteries.  The brigade consists of 3 line infantry battalions, and 3 leger battalions. They're essentially split into a Line Infantry Regiment with 3 battalions, a Leger Regiment with 2 battalions, and a Leger Regiment of 1 battalion.


Going from left to right, looking at the "complete" army, is the Cavalry Brigade.

The cavalry brigade consists of 2 hussar regiments (1er and 2eme Regiment du Hussards), and 2 Chasseurs-a-Cheval regiments (1er and 13eme Regiment de Chasseurs-a-Cheval), along with a horse artillery battery.


There is also a regiment of lancers that are out of place but are added in this placement photo because it's currently not part of anything, much like the Dragoon and Eclaireurs-de-la-Garde that currently act as "bodyguards" for the General de Division. Eventually though, I'll be adding another 2 regiments of lancers to have a lancer brigade.


The lancer models, from Magister Militum I was surprisingly pleased with, and felt they had the right proportions, and were also easy to paint. I ended up doing some surgical work on the porte-etendard and painted my own flag in its stead.



The final brigade, is the second infantry brigade. Consisting of 5 battalions of infantry, of which four are line infantry (two regiments with 1st and 2nd battalions each), and one Leger battalion in skirmish/open order to represent the more "veteran" Leger. Regiment wise, the flag was painted to represent the 9eme Regiment d'Infanterie Legere. This brigade too, is reinforced with a foot artillery battery.

All in all, this totals the French army at 11 infantry battalions, 7 cavalry regiments, 3 foot artillery batteries, and 1 horse artillery battery. The skirmisher stands have not all been completed, with several stands still need doing (depending on the ruleset used).

In addition, I have another 2 line infantry regiments left to do (though not sure whether to paint them up as the Swiss or one regular line and the other Joseph Napoleon), and one combined line grenadier battalion.

Eventually, I'll also have to paint up another brigade general and equalize the brigade around a 4-5 battalions per brigade mark.

That's it for the French for now!