Mission 1: accomplished

Phew. It's done. 96 figures later, I'm finally done with painting the Kingdom of Westphalia paint-conversions.
It took me nearly 6 months of time, an uncounted number of painting hours and lots of nerves and volition to stay only on this project, not getting distracted.
Not to mention those awful evenings when I painted muskets or shakos all night long.

A picture of the full 'army' (excluding the artillery gun)

Well - here's the gun...

In fact, I'm really glad with the results. It required a lot of patience and research to complete this 'army' and I'd like to say a lot of thanks to Alfons Cánovas and his great blog from which I got (or could further research) the required answers to the often contradictory uniform descriptions for the army of the Kingdom of Westphalia. In fact, I got several different descriptions for guard uniforms alone. So in fact, it's very hard to figure out which source is right about which details.

Some staff officers

 As said before, I have used a mixture of metal figures from Schmaeling (Art Miniatures)  and Schilling Schilling-Figuren which really look great side-by-side, although the Art figures look a bit rougher while the Schilling figures are a bit more detailed. Nevertheless - the mix looks great and together, it's the wides range of stand-by Napoleonic French-type infantry figures that you can find on the market.

Fusilier guards (conversions)

I had to make a lot of additional plumes, cords, epaulettes, tassels and stuff in order to get the right results. So green stuff was one of my best friends. Hope you like the results so far - now it's up to me to find the right base for arranging these figures to a diorama that will at least be 25*36cm in total - Mission 2, so to say.

Sorry for not posting anything in the last weeks, but what should I have posted? Pictures of Westphalians in all stages of completion... *yawn*

Well. Time for other projects now. Btw - do you remember this guy?

Guess what? It's Westphalians all over the place

Hi again!

It's not as if I don't paint miniatures anymore. It's only that it seems I'm just painting Westphalians, over and over and over again. This is exactly why I never painted whole armies - again, I'm suffering from painting the same things for hours. Oh. It's Thursday - that's boots'n shakos' day... hurray... M-(

The advantage (the only one) is: when you finish something, you finish quite a bunch of figures at once.
And I cannot deny that I'm really pleased with the first results. So here are some little impressions, shot with my smartphone camera - picture quality could be much better, as could be the lighting.

First example is a squad of Guard jaeger (chasseurs/hunters) in their magnificent green/yellow uniforms.
Honestly, I wanted to paint these guys since a long, long time. Finally, I made it.
This unit is a mixture of Schilling and Schmaeling metal figures. As you can see, they fit together really well.

The first line infantrymen are also finished. As these will be the bulk of the planned dio, there are more of them to follow soon. Next will be painting metal parts and hair colours over and over again...
These figures are completely from Schilling.

Oh - and I painted a Napoleonic cannon for the first time. It's an 8pd Gribeauval gun, once again a metal model from Schmaeling. Art-miniatures has several different cannons to offer and they come as a construction kit - quite delicate, with small parts and not easy to assemble when you are such a bad tinkerer as I am. Nevertheless, the model itself looks really nice. No comparizon with those cheap gun models from the plastic soldier sets.

I hope you enjoyed this little insight in my current project. I still have around 30 foot figures plus the 6 mounted general staff figures to be painted. Guess this'll keep me busy for a while.

Happy holidays!

It's christmas time again. Wow - where the heck has the year gone?
I really wonder about the speed in which time has passed this year. Maybe it's because there was that much to do. Many things happened, some good, some bad - but now it's time to lay this year to rest and have some nice and stress-free days with family and friends.

Which will, of course, include some hours of painting. Hopefully. ;-D
I haven't taken a new photo yet, just because I don't have finished anything in the last weeks. I'm not very good in painting the same sort of soldiers in large numbers and so I have, again, the feeling that nothing will ever get finished. You know - one day you paint muskets and shako plates for hours, but that doesn't finish a single figure. The only thing to prevent frustration is to remind myself that one day, I'll finish 40 in a row.

That brings me to the question: was this a successful year in painting? Did I reach the goals I set up for myself back at the beginning of this year?

- all not yet painted Swiss regiments (3 are left, of which I have one on 75%)
- soldiers for the regiments Isle de Ré and Walcheren (currently at 50%)
- Baden foot guards (one at 90%)
- Wurzburg light infantry and regimental artillery
- 1st provisional Croatian infantry
- King Joseph Napleons' Spanish guard grenadiers
- Italian light infantry

Well okay – those were the plans that I set up at the beginning of this year.

What of that has been completed?

Let's just see – due to my records, the list above represents around 48 figures.

Plus two single figures for competition reasons, the goal was 50 figures (net).

And here's what I've finished from that list:

• two Swiss regiments and one figure from the remaining regiment (leaving four)
• Isle de Ré and Walcheren soldiers
• One Baden foot guard (leaving three)
• Wurzburg light infantry (leaving one for the regimental artillery)
• 1^st provisional Croatian infantry
• Both competition figures

With the Spanish and the Italians, I haven't even started. Total in comparizon to goal: 25 of 50 (the Italian light infantry represents (in full order) 14 figures alone, on three bases).

As always, I got too distracted again. It started in January, when I was distracted by painting something for my visitors and went through the whole year when I painted this and that and got finally involved in two new projects, after a long election campaign which drew me away from painting for several weeks. So – objectively – what did I manage two complete?

Apart from the things mentioned above:

• two Russian hussars
• two Belgian line infantrymen
• three soldiers to complete the 1^st etranger regiment display
• three early Italian light infantry carabiniers
• one figure of early Naples foot velites
• one figure to complete the Hanoverian legion display
• two figures to represent the Dutch grenadier guards of 1808/9
• five figures for the 63^rd French infantry regiment of the line
• three figures for the Tirailleurs du Po regiment display
• five figures for the 33^rd French infantry rgt. in white uniforms
• eight figures for the early Kingdom of Holland grenadiers display
• one French soldier for the deserter project
• one mounted Cleve-Berg national guardsman
• four figures of the Andeas Hofers' band set
• ten Westphalian guard grenadiers (conversions of Franznap Naples guard velites)
• one Westphalian mounted ADC (paint-conversion of a French ADC from ARTminiatures)
• one Westphalian NCO of line fusiliers (paint-conversion of French fusiliers from Schilling)
• two competition single figures

In addition, this is what I recently started:

• two elite Hussars of the French 4^th regiment
• one Naples sapper
• a farmers' wife
• 26 Westphalian line fusiliers
• 11 Westphalian guard hunters
• 2 Westphalian generals (mounted)
• 2 Westphalian ADCs (mounted)
• 1 Westphalian hussar (mounting)
• 5 Westphalian artillerymen and a 8pd gun

Okay. This sums up to 80 completed figures. Plus 51 in different stages of process.

In relation to my output of the years before, I'm pretty happy with that, taken into account the few time I had for painting. I even guess it wasn't too bad to miss the intended specific goals. ;-)

I'm happily looking forward for the next year. I will not set up another to-do-list for 2014, because it doesn't make much sense. Let's just paint whatever we like and have lots of fun with it!

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. :-)

Short greetings to Peter!

Hey, Peter - that's one for you to give you the proof you're not sending me all those figures for nothing. ;-)

That's why I wanted to have one of these French dragoons - an easy conversion into a mounted Cleve-Berg national guardsman. I only had to add a plume to the helmet and that was it.

I first saw that uniform on the Histofig website and directly loved it - so much white and gold. :-)
Sorry about the sheepskin.