Project: Isembourg Regiment band

Well - one of the most beautiful uniforms within the Grande Armee was worn by the 2nd foreign regiment, the regiment d'Isembourg. Their uniforms were coloured in the blue of the heaven, combined with yellow and red.

Quite a while ago I bought that infamous command set from Strelets, Napoleons general staff (dismounted). For having a closer look on it, follow http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.aspx?id=765.

As you can see, this set contains lots of useful figures in good poses. The figures themselve are of good quality and have a real good expression in their faces when painted.
What is more strange is that this set also contains an army band:

Okay, to be honest it's a part of an army band. Or maybe the elite of it whatsoever. For a while, I wondered what to do with these musicians. That was until I stumbled accross a picture of the uniforms of the musicians of the 2nd foreign regiment. Blue, yellow and white. That was the solution to it!

So far, so good. But not enough that they made up a band of just lousy seven people, they missed the most important thing: the tambour major!
A friend from the Benno's forum fortunately sent me a picture of an old Knoetel page which just showed exactly what I needed: the tambour major of 2nd regiment etranger.

Well... now I had the pictures, I looked around for a bicorn-wearing officer that looked like being sufficient to hold the tambour majors' staff.... I found it in the same set, a general presenting his sword while marching on.
The first step was to cut off the sword. Then I started to carve off every detail of the uniform that didn't fit to the Knoetel picture. The plume and all that feathery stuff on the bicorn had to be modelled and glued onto the bicorn - I simply scrath-built that with bits from a paper handkerchief and some wood glue.
Finally, I heated a needle until it glowed in bright yellow and shove it upward through the figures' hand. On bottom below the hand I added a small ball also made from the same stuff as the feathers. And this was the result:

So it's time to start painting. At first, I made the mistake to pre-paint this buddy in light grey as I usually do. Therefore, I had to paint several layers of yellow until the whole figure didn't appear to look somehow 'green' anymore...

I know that this still doesn't look too impressive, but it's not more than 40% ready...

Update 13th of July: I started prepainting the musicians. My work on the tambour major is still not done - I added some details, but as long as I had been working on finishing some older projects... well - too many projects, too less time. Nevertheless have I made a new picture to show my progress:

That's not very much, I know. But I think it already gives  a good impression of how nice the whole setup will look when it's done.

 ...and this shall give a better impression... You see that I'm still working on it. I replaced the photo with a newer one. As you can see, the flutist is so far complete. Sorry for the bad photo quality - the subtle shading is hard to be seen.

And here they are:

Now aren't they just great? It was quite a hard work - yellow is a really weird colour. White decorations on yellow are even worse - as you can see I often kept that project aside because I simply didn't have the right mood to deal with these tricky little figures. But now that I have completed this band, I'm really happy with the result. I'll decide about basing them later - I'm still not sure if I want to base them solely or together with a bunch of marching Isembourg soldiers.