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. :-)