Nothing to do with wargaming again but I'm a renaissance type man, Roger Waters & Pink Floyd-isms

I love a good guitar solo/duo



There you go, feel all chilled and relaxed now?

Brass effects

Just posted this (poke me with your mouse) on figvfig about a quick brass painting exercise I was mucking about with. Some of you may find it interesting, the photo's didn't turn out too bad and I think the effect might work well on brass or bronze armoured troops

regards
dave

Women and painting = latest work in progress

Hmmmmm,

Not quite what you had in mind, don't worry me either.
What started out as "I might do some painting" ended up being "you will be painting the bedroom"

Which then became, "the spare room will need to painted first" because "we will need to move our old bedroom furniture in there while you paint the bedroom"


Hang on a minute! What do you mean "old" bedroom furniture? Apparently newly painted bedrooms must have newly acquired bedroom furniture, stands to reason     ..........huh?

So let me get this straight.

Finish painting a seven years war battalion = paint bedroom + paint spare room x new bedroom furniture but only when newly painted bedroom = new bedroom furniture.



The joy of it is that the house is of very old hard wood (bloody hard) construction, the timber has had 87 years of shrinkage so all the joints in the walls and ceilings have to be raked and filled, nails are virtually impossible to pull out and if you can get one out in one piece you have to wait 10 minutes before it is cool enough to pick up, oh what joy!

Figure painting postings will be sporadic if at all for a couple of weeks, annoyance levels will be high, blood pressure will be critical (she who must be restrained is threatening to helping me, good grief).

I have been toying with the idea of black undercoating one of the door frames and giving it the three tone Dallimore/Foundry special for a laugh while she's not about *sigh*.

It's enough to make me take up warhammer and have a game with the spotty, volume 11, teenagers down the GW shop ...........or put my head in a toaster oven.

Painting Lally's Wild Geese Regiment

Originally this figure and his 3 colleagues had been primed for the Piemont regiment however I found the primer too dark and put them aside for cleaning and repriming with a much lighter grey primer that I had been originally using, as is so often the case a stuff up led to one thing that led to another and a half decent paint job resulted. 

One evening while giving my eyes a rest I decided a change from painting white uniforms was needed, what about those figures I had put aside, how could I avoid cleaning and repriming but keep the momentum going on the French? Seeing as how my French SYW/WAS army would contain a number of Infanterie Entrangere I decided to scout out a suitable regiment that would fit the cut of uniform and equipment, but where a darker primer might be used without giving the game away, happily the Regiment Irlandais de Lally Tollendal of the Wild Geese seemed like it might fit.

This is the darker primer grey I used which is pretty much a standard car primer grey, way too dark for the white grey of the French uniform and no where near the white undercoat I'm determined to make a success of, eventually. The figure was given a wash with Artist Acrylic black brown which differs from the panes grey the French infantry figures are washed with.
I'm painting quite a bit with washes or well thinned down paints and find a shading wash over the primer first seems to carry the shading effect through to completion of the job.

View from the rear, I had thought of giving the Irish greyish cloth packs hence the blue wash but stuck with the linen coloured cloth in the end. You will notice that when the next photos appear that the they don't have the facing colours, this is simply because the primer photos that fit with the figure below turned out pretty poor so I quickly took a few new photo's of one of the others lads waiting to be kitted out.

When it came to painting the coat it didn't take me long to realise that I was going to be rowing up 'that' creek without adequate means of propulsion in a prickly canoe. Just going over the undercoat with red paint or wash was not going to be viable, the undercoat was too dark and the approach would need a re-think, if you look closely at this feller you can just make out he has already received a thinned coat of red paint prior to the rethink. Similarly it didn't look like a highlight with white first would get a desirable out come either so falling back onto an idea which came about with a hard plastic roman figure I painted recently I decided highlight over the aborted red with an orange highlight and then paint the figure with thinned red wash and hope the whole lot blended together.

I only painted one half of the figure first of and used very thin wash (4 water : 1 ink maybe weaker) in case the whole idea turned to cack. Good news, as I started laying on the wash the effect I was looking for seemed to be coming together and I splashed an another coat (although this photo doesn't do the shade of red much justice), this is roughly about five (!) coats of thinned wash.

Eventually this would recieve another two coats of 1:1 wash which you will see later on (last three photo's) or the earlier post if you have been looking around.  Feeling pretty confident I had a plan to work with I started on the other side of the miniature.

So here it is (shown above), working off my cunning plan I thinned down a coat of red paint which left the darker areas of the brown black wash over primer to suck in the light and provide the shade and picked out the highlight points and larger flat areas with the orange to reflect the light. Well time to splash on the red wash and see........

..........I think it worked out ok for something that was going to take a swim in dettol or acetone.

Quick note on the photographs, I had adjusted the camera aperture setting (going into manual territory ??? oh my gawd) and switched back to the 'chrome film' effect for these shots as this gave a very good representation of the shade of red under lower light conditions and this (link) is a pretty accurate representation of the colour and hue under higher (filtered sun) light conditions.

I'll wrap this little painting saga up tomorrow with paint brands and names for those that might be interested, but right now I think I might go and watch Mark Webber win the Hungarian F1 race AGAIN, strange I never get sick of watching Vettel being beaten by his team mate. ;-) Brrrrrrm....

oink oink!

SYW French Grenadier: Peimont Infantry Regiment #4

The Regimental Officer made an appearance a week or so back and now it is the turn of the grenadier, as with the previous post these photos are to help my poor old peepers before I decide to motor on with the rest of the unit.

I t gives the eyes a break to take the photos and then view them on the screen where it is much easier to pick up on any detail, hence the combobulator keyboard and other desky type stuff in the background.  More detailed shots of the painting process will follow with a description.

The uniform for this regiment remained fairly well unchanged for much of the 18th C, with the waistcoat colour being the major change.

I'm a little surprised that the cross belts come out quite tan in the photos, as with the Lally figure, even though they are a cross between a buffish dirty brown in the lead. Similar with the cartridge box which is a much darker tan colour where as here it appears the same shade as the belts.

Overall there is only a few differences between the line infantryman and the grenadiers as far as the figure is concerned, these being the sabre and the moustache. A few more exist in uniform colour such as the hat lace is considered to be gold-coloured (not gold) lace as opposed to yellow hat lace in some sources and brass buttons as opposed to yellow buttons.

All these details can be argued till the cows come home, my two main criteria are is it accurate enough to be easily identifiable as the regiment it is painted as and secondly does it please me. This is pretty close to satisfying those criteria.

Reference sources Mouliard Les regiments sous LouisXV (above), the Osprey No 302. Louis the XV's Army (2), Kronoskaf (below) and Pengel and Hurt uniform booklets. Once again sources vary slightly, take Kronoskaf plate below sourced from the Lucien Moulliard plate above one shows a black cockade and the other white? I think white looks better, hoorah!

SYW Irish in French Service: Wild Geese Regiment Lally's

A few pics of the finished Infantryman of Lally de Tollendal Wild Geese Regiment, Irishmen in French service. It is thought that by the SYW it is more likely to be Frenchmen in an Irish regiment in French service, but I'll let others with more time to argue that one out.

These photos have been taken as part of my final check (poor eyesight) before I finalise the colours and uniform details. Basically to make sure I'm happy.

Unfortunately with uniforms from the 18th C (French in particular) uniform regulations varied quite a bit in detail, then compound that with modern reference sources which vary just as much on a given period of  the uniform regulations, then add on commanding officers attention to the official regulations.... blah blah blah......

I have found two wildly different shades of green for facing colours and hat trim has been shown as either yellow or white. As far as I'm concerned this is my preferred shade of green for the facings however the hat lace I may change to white, although that may necessitate changing the buttons to tin, it just doens't end 8)

The colour for the linen sack and leather shade for the accoutrament  I found pretty acceptable (though some may find the leather isn't buff enough). The majority of the Wild Geese regiments probably had turnbacks on their coats and lapels although I have found two plates where Lally's doesn't show this so I'm going with the standard French uniform 'cut of coat' for this regiment. I'm not decided what to do for the other Wild Geese regiments as I may have to source a figure outside of the Minden range or do some conversion work on a figure with turnbacks and lapels.  Have to wait and see how the range pans out and whether the little details are such as packs etc are of as much importance to me as the turnbacks and lapels, if it gets too hard I suspect not ;-)

As I mentioned earlier these are more or less photos of a final draft (of the figure) nature of which many are taken along the way just to aid with getting a clear view (I must get to the optometrist). I have taken a series of pictures with the view of detailing the painting process which I will post later with those details

Two of the sources used in the research, the lower is from the excellent online SYW resource Kronoskaf and the upper the equally good Mouliard Les regiments sous LouisXV online resource for the Moulliard plates of the French Army of, yes you have guessed it, Louis the 15th.