More metalheads!

Okay. Thanks to an incredibly fast packing and shipping service, I got a parcel full of more work to do today. I don't complain - I wanted it that way. So here are 29 new figures, waiting to become Westphalian line infantry.

I can only say that Schilling-Figuren (http://www.schilling-figuren.de/) is a great distributor.
Not only that they are reliable and fast, they also produce highly detailed metal figures which are worth their price (while being quite cheap in comparizon - another 'plus').

Well. This is going to be a long painting job, I guess. I never ever painted so many figures for one single sort unit - I just was too impatient for such a thing. I'm curious if I'll be able to manage it this time. :-)

Tiroleans - here comes Hofers' band

Back at Heiden, a visitor showed up at the Bennos' forum booth and gave me a little gift:
some brand new casts made of tin. The group of four represents Tiroleans of the Tirolean uprising led by Andreas Hofer against the Bavarian oppressors.

If you like to have your own, you should visit Tom's blog and contact him under miniaturen1-72.blogspot.com

Okay Tom, here they are:

A little bit closer:

And from the backside:

This is a quite unusual subject, because these are villager militiamen wearing typical Tirolean traditional dresses. It took a while to find sources with proper descriptions of the different variations for this region.
I enjoyed painting them, they are well modelled, show all relevant details, with highly detailed faces. Therefore, it's easy to give them character through painting.

Again, I'm noticing that I have turned into the metal figure business quite a lot. In two weeks, there will be another figure trade show in Herne, Germany (1st of December) which I will mainly visit in order to buy more metal figures.

But I will soon come along with some new figures for my long-term project, I promise. Although I begin to doubt that I will fullfill my own plannings that I made at the beginning of this year.
I still have one Swiss regiment to complete and I haven't started with the Italian light infantry and the Joseph Napoleon guard grenadiers. And looking at the calendar, I don't expect to finish them this year, there has benn - again - simply too much other stuff that attracted my attention. :-)

Continuing with the Westphalians...

I'm just back from an 11 day holiday at the German Northern Sea coast. I enjoyed a rough storm and many days of quite sunny and mild weather - out with my wife, my kids and my parents-in-law at the shoreline.

In the evenings, I tried to continue with the HaT Wurttemberg grenadiers I started to paint in my last Northern Sea vacation almost two years ago - and again broke it up because it's just no fun to paint these dudes. Too few details, too less face detailing... it simply doesn't make fun. Maybe I'm getting too fastidious with these metal figures from Franznap, Schilling and Schmaeling I've been working with.
It's much easier to get a satisfying result with a good sculpted figure then trying to force a merely sufficient result out of a low detailed, 2nd generation plastic miniature. They're good enough for low wargaming standard, not more, not less.

Luckily, I had some other figures with me, so I was able to start with the Tiroleans and proceed with the French Elite hussars from ART miniatures. Both are still not ready, so the following pictures show you what I've completed shortly before I left to the sea.

Both are paint conversions, because the original model allowed to paint them differently then intended with only some minor modifications.

The first example is a French ADC from ART Miniatures, converted into a Westphalian ADC.

Blue and yellow. I like that combination. What I don't like that much, are horses of the white kind. I'm still not too happy with the result, but nevertheless it fits best with the colours of saddlecloth and rider.

In addition, I have finished my 10-soldier-row of Westphalian guard grenadiers. I paint-converted them from Franznaps' incredibly good sculpted Naples guard velites. Here are some examples:

 To the left or two the right? The officer and his NCO seem to have a little dispute about which way to go...

...while the soldiers are asking themselves what should be done next if someone would ask them.

I decided to try a harder shading, using thinned light grey in two shading steps. The result looks a bit rough in close-up, but seen from a 30cm+ distance, the contrast works pretty fine for the eye, especially because these guardsmen will later be positioned in the backstage of the diorama.

It's especially a delight that they correspond very well with the figures from ART Miniatures and Schilling, both in size and appearance. The only thing I need to do now is buying some additional tin-men. :-)