Having finished the Lion Rampant Campaign, it’s back to painting my Napoleonic Army. I’m still working on the British 6th Division at Waterloo and having completed the English Regiments, I’m back on the Hanoverian contingent. There were four Hanoverian Landwehr units in the Division, Verden, Lunberg, Munden & Osterode and so far I have painted two of them. So on with the third unit now. First of all a disclaimer! I have decided to model two of the units wearing Stove pipe shakos and two wearing the flat field hats for no other reason than they will look nice on the wargames table. Actually finding accurate descriptions of exactly what the Hanoverian Landwehr really wore is difficult to say the least, with the usual conflicting advice from various sources and experts.
Broadly speaking, the Hanoverian Landwehr were dressed as British Redcoats but with stovepipe shakos rather than the new Belgiac shakos and with a blanket rather than the usual haversack & kit. The stove pipe shakos also seem to have the cords that weren’t present on the original ‘Peninsular’ Stovepipe shakos. Just to add to the confusion, the Hanoverian Field Battalions, or regulars were dressed more or less as British regulars and did have Belgiac shakos & all the kit! As for the officers, they were drafted in from the KGL or other British regular units so could be wearing any Regts uniform although they probably adopted the yellow sash of the Hanoverian Army.
I suspect that the general principle was that the regular field units were kitted out in the ‘latest’ British uniforms whilst the Landwehr had the cast off’s from the Peninsular campaign and anything else that was kicking around the quartermasters stores when they were called up!
To add to my modelling woes, whilst Victrix used to do a nice set of conversion heads that I used for my first unit, they have now been discontinued, so some conversion work will be required! I already had 8 extra figures left over from my first go at painting Hanoverians so I would incorporate these into the new unit. The picture at the top shows how the new Battalion will look when finished. I decided to use the running figures from the Vitrix set as I had some of these left over from previous projects. Rather than have a lot figures in the same pose, I thought that Iwould convert them to look as though the unit was taking casualties. I like to have different poses in my units and try to have a bit of a story going on. I know that some wargamers prefer a uniform look and like to see all of the figuresin a unit in the same pose. Whilst it does make life easier, I find it tiresome painting the same pose over & over again. Besides, I like to do a bit of modelling for a change!
The close up above shows the original running figure on the right and the conversion on the left. To get the figure to look as though it is falling it was simply a matter of cutting through the back of each leg and bending them backwards. Once the glue had set, I put some filler into the gap on the front of the knees and I had my falling casualty. I then used a couple of standard arms from the set and the head is a spare peninsular head from the Perry boxed set. I’ve actually made an error by adding the back packs, so these will come off and be replaced by a simple blanket made using green stuff. The shako’s aren’t correct either, as they are missing the cords. So the plan is to carefully shave down the badge plate and either use cotton thread, thin wire or green stuff to make the cords. I suspect that modelling the shakos will be the biggest challenge & somewhat time consuming but it will mean that the models in the unit will look about right. When they are painted , I’m sure that they will all blend in.
As you can see, for a few small cuts, you can get a very different and dynamic pose!
So there is my next project under way, a total of 14 more Hanoverians to finish modelling & painting. Meanwhile, I’ve been busy with the paint brush as well. I finished off the DeeZee standing Lion:
and I couldn’t resist painting Ze-Khor, Lord of the Jungle, from the Lucid Eye range. These are just quick pictures. I’ll get some better ones up on face book later!
