I Love These Figures

I wish that were true.

The fact is: I hate these figures from Ebor. They are sub-par and they are awful to paint. I have another two squadrons of them and I'm not in any hurry to paint them. But I suppose I will and when I have further need for WSS Horse I'll be looking at Front Rank.

These figures took me about two weeks to paint because I just didn't want to do them and I ended up committing to less than one hour per day in getting them done. That's very slow for me and the paint job is sub-par too (just to keep in line with the figures).

Anyway, here they are: 2nd Squadron, Regiment Tarente.

I Got Sidetracked

I did. It's true.

My main project at the start of the year was to create a French army for the War of the Spanish Succession but someone asked me to play a game of Firefight and I got lead astray.

But I'm back on track. All the work I put into me Firefight display fro my club's open day was worth the effort because I now have a very nice sci-fi city. But now it's time to get back to the WSS.

Anyhow, to re-start here is my newest addition: 1st battalion Regiment Langeudoc.

1st Vermandois - WSS

My first post for a while and I'm back to getting my French for the War of Spanish Succession painted up and ready. I'm still going fairly slowly on these guys and interspersing their progress with smaller (& easier) projects.

These troops form the third battalion of Montmorency's Brigade at Blenheim - the 1st Vermandois. I only have one more battalion to do to complete the brigade and I hope to get them done in the next couple of weeks. Then it's on to some cavalry!

This is, again, a very nice looking battalion with a great colourful flag of red, yellow, purple and green quarters - Although you can't really see much of it in the pics. Once again these figures are from Ebor Miniatures. I love the finished look of these figures but I have to admit that I don't enjoy preparing them. They require far too much filing to get rid of mold lines and removal of excess metal from torn molds. But the end results are always nice.

You may have noticed, if you've looked at my other battalions, that I'm using a painting method that I believe brings out the best in historical big battalions. After undercoating the figure I paint in the flesh parts and then apply a flesh wash. The rest of the figure is painted in flat colours with no shading or washes.

Doing things this way means there is a need to be fairly accurate with the brush as mistakes can be pretty glaring. Having said that I don't go out of my way to make things perfect - Just fairly accurate. This method is great for big battalions as it really makes the figures stand out and gives the formed unit a great presence at a distance on the table-top. I used this style for my Napoleonic Prussians too.

P.S. - The background buildings and paved foreground are made from printed terrain.

1st Nivernais

It took me a bit longer than I anticipated but I finally finished the second battalion of my French WSS force. Like the 1st Bourbon this battalion is part of Montmorency's Brigade at Blenhiem.

I like the colours of this battalion. The strange mix of blue cuffs, red gaiters and yellow hat lace makes them look very colourful. This contrasts well with their flag which is somewhat understated.

I'm not sure about the cuff colour. I looked at a lot of reference material and other models of this unit and the colour varied dramatically, from a light cobalt to a very dark blue (even a dark green bordering on black). I opted for a dark sky blue.

Again, I made the flags using photoshop.

I mounted them on the custom 60 x 50mm bases that we had made by Mike Parker.

The photos are taken in front of some card-stock buildings that I made a few weeks back, just before Christmas. For a dollar per pdf, paper and pages from a watercolour pad they make very nice 28mm terrain (they can be scaled to any figure size too). The most expensive part about these is the printer ink cartridges.

My First WSS Regiment

Well, I've started into my 2017 War of Spanish Succession project.

This is the 1st Bourbon Regiment from Montmorency's Brigade as at Blenheim. I decided to use Blenheim as a reference point because there is a lot of information available and I decided to start with Montmorency's Brigade because I once use to live in the Melbourne suburb of Montmorency and it isn't far from where I live now.

I'm going to make about 7 or 8 infantry regiments, 2 or 3 of cavalry, one dragoon regiment and a few guns. For "Lily Banners" that's about three commands and should be enough to get some decent games underway.

The figures are Ebor Miniatures and although they look quite nice they're not as easy to paint as Front Rank and they require quite a bit to effort to clean up mold lines. I hope that then next regiment I do are a better cast.

Anyway, the end result looks nice.

The flags were, again, made by me using photoshop. The flag finials are by by Front Rank, they top the whole thing off very nicely.

WSS Project for 2017 & Some Flags

I decided a couple of months back that my project for 2017 is going to be The War of Spanish Succession. I was going to do the Seven Years War but a friend convinced me to go for something closer to the Golden Age of Piracy.  And after a bit of a research into the era and looking at uniforms etc, I was convinced.

Then there was also the fantastically presented Beneath the Lily Banners by The League of Augsburg which also went a long way to sway my feeble & easily influenced mind. All those beautiful figures and colourful flags. What more can a wargamer ask for?

So, I've been hitting up Ebor Miniatures pretty hard for their excellent value, regimental deals. Lovely figures and I can't wait to get stuck into them in the new year. I've also collected some Front Rank to supplement the Ebor chaps. And, being a bit of a Francophile, I decided to go with a French army but I can see that I'll, more than likely, move onto other nations some time in the future.

Actually getting prepared for a project is something new for me, as I usually just go full-steam-ahead on whatever comes along. I'll be interested to see how I go with a bit more structure and pre-planning.

I've also decided to collect my troops in line with the Battle of Blenheim as there seems to be a goodly amount of information available on uniforms & organisation as well as there being a fair few nations/armies involved. 

Anyway, because I have to do "something", and I'm being very patient with my desire to drop everything else and immediately start painting figures, I decided to start doing flags. So, I created a nice big photoshop working file that I can chop and change to create all the flags I'll ever need (I hope). I can see that some of these are going to be a challenge (the Dauphin's flag for instance) but I'll tackle them as I need them.

Here are some that I've done so far. These are low quality jpegs and I don't know if they're any good for printing. I save them as full sized pdfs for printing. If you want them, leave a comment and I'll send them on to you.

This is what I'm going to start with when the painting begins. 

Apart from the colourful flags, there is a suburb close to me named Montmorency (where I use to live many years ago).

This one is one of the first pages I made before I decided to organise them into brigades.