Welcome back to part two of painting my Perry hussars. As you will recall we are painting six perry hussars and have so far applied the first three colours.
The next colour I used was Dark Prussian Blue (899) to paint the pelise and the dolman. The pelise is the short jacket worn over the Hussars’ shoulders, and the dolman is the tight fitting jacket that they wore underneath with all the equipment strapped around them.
When it comes to the blue you are going to paint over lace and I don’t think that’s a problem, because when you come to paint the white lace you’ll need the blue there to show through.
The next colour I came to paint is Iraqi Sand (819), which I have used on their haversacks, which are shown in the reference pictures as an off white colour.
Having painted the haversacks, the next job was to paint the water bottles, which are a light blue. I mixed this colour myself, as I didn’t have anything suitable on my workbench.
The next issue was the colour of the lining on the pelise, which according to the Perry’s instruction sheet should be red, but in my other sources… Mont Saint Jean shows no colour; Osprey show the pelise lining in light blue; and in CE Franklins’s British Napoleonic Uniforms, there are some very clear pictures and a table both of which are contradictory! The table in the book says light blue on the officers pelisse and on the troopers, white. There is a picture of an officer and the pelisse lining is light blue, but the picture of the trooper shows it as light blue too…and then I looked in the general introduction section of the book and there’s a picture of the pelise with light blue lining…so I am confused! I decided that the light blue lining looked better than Red and so went with this. The point of all this is to illustrate the discrepancies that you find when researching uniforms. I suspect that all of the lining colours are correct and it depended on the squadron but who really knows… I took prussian blue and mixed with white, to get a nice shade of light blue and got on with the painting!
Next up was to paint the overalls a dark grey (994), the leather water bottle belt (871), steel(864) for the sword holder(?) and stirrups and red line on the overalls(947). And so onto the most complex job – the white fur & lace!
I’ve put the white lace on as you can see in the picture above, the minute you put the white paint on the figure starts to come alive. As I am painting this colour I will often touch up the other colours, and I decided when I got to this stage I would carry on and finish the figure. So I have also done the brass on the sword hilt, the various buckles and on the sword holder- I must find out what that’s called [ed: scabbard?], and the chinstrap. I have also painted his mustache, all my troopers will have chocolate brown mustaches…
As you can see the addition of the white has brought him together, but there are two colours missing; the yellow (953) for the cord on the hat, and the blue bag on the hat needs to be a strong bright blue (844), and I wanted it to be a different blue to the lining of the pelise.
I’ve used steel on the sword and I will paint over that with silver, and I will just brush up other colours before we use the quick shade.
So we’re nearly finished. In part three I’ll show you the finished models and discuss how I use the quickshade and how I finished basing the models.
