Christmas and the New Year Holidays have come and gone and despite succumbing to the current version of ‘Man Flu’ that is doing the rounds, I have made some progess with my various projects. This blog entry is really a round up of some of these, with a few photographs to show the state of play and to clear my mind for the next round of painting and gaming.
My Portuguese Brigade is taking shape.
First up those pesky Portuguese! Well not really pesky but in committing to paint a full brigade of these troops, they have dominated my painting desk for the last couple of months. I am now at the stage where I have completed 72 figures, or three battalions with a further 12 just needing to be based and the final 12 halfway through painting.
The final 12 figures are on the painting desk.
I shouldn’t really be too hard on myself in terms of progress. I am about a week away from completing 96 figures. In addition to that I have painted two mounted officers, giving me a total of 98 new figures for my collection. On reflection, not a bad achievement as I now have a core for a future Peninsular Army.
Officer commanding the 11th Line Regiment
If you have missed previous blog articles on how and why I have chosen this Brigade please follow this link back to the last article, which does explain how I decided to construct the units in the brigade.
Officer commanding the 23rd Line Regiment
You will notice that I have added some British Officers as they were often attached to the Portuguese Battalions. There is also a couple of Sappers. I have used a bit of licence when it comes to the two Sappers in the Brigade. The only reference that I could find for these came from a picture that I found on Pinterest. To visit my Portuguese pinterest board, click on this link.
Command section, 11th Penamacor Regiment.
I have already prepared the next part of the Portuguese project, another 10 Cacadores to use as Skirmishers. The good news is that they have brown uniforms, so I can take a break from painting blue for a while.
Cacadores ready for priming
All the figures are from Warlord games with the exception of a few of the Portuguese line infantry & command , which are Victrix metals, now available I think, from Brigade games in the States.
28th North Gloucestershires ready for painting!
Also lurking in the back ground is a prepared and primed Battalion of British infantry for the Waterloo period – they will be the next in the queue after the Cacadores but I am going to try a slightly different approach to painting this unit. I will still complete them as a batch paint job but rather than get bogged down with another long project, I intend to ‘dip in and out’ of painting these whilst getting on with some other less time consuming subjects.
Saga Bases textured
My other project that is now complete is my Irish Saga war band. I had been playing with using some simple Saga movement trays and finally got to texturing these to help them blend in with the figure bases. It was one of those small jobs that kept getting put to one side but well worth the 10 minutes or so that it took. I think that I may well gradually move all of my Saga Warbands into these, if nothing else than to make transporting them easier. The texturing was simply done using my favourite Vallejo Dark Earth Paste, painted & dry brushed with a chocolate brown/Iraqi Sand mix and some green scatter added on top.
Sarissa Precision Grain Store
I’ve also finished another Sarissa Precision Dark Age Building – the grain store. I’ve added some extra details using match sticks and the Vallejo dark earth paste as ‘daube’. I have covered how I detailed the Sarissa buildings in a previous post and to read more, click here. I now have four buildings for my Saga settlement.
Trent Miniatures Sherry Casks
And so that pretty much brings me up to date. The only other small project on the go is to finish painting a set of Sherry casks from Trent Miniatures. To be honest, I’m not sure what I intend to do with these. I just thought that they were nice replicas and I fancied having a go at trying some new techniques in painting wood, so they are a bit of an experiment. It is this sort of project that I hope to shoe-horn in between painting some of the larger units that I would like to complete my Napoleonic collection.
I am off to play my first Black powder game of the year tonight, so I am now fully back into the swing of my hobby. If the coming year is as productive as last year, it will be a fun year!