Digging into the Lead Mountain

I was waiting for some new figures to arrive and had a bit of painting time to spare, so I thought I’d bite the bullet and clear some of my lead mountain.

Chosen were some 15mm American Civil War (ACW) infantry to add to an incomplete Confederate army. I’d last worked on the army well before the arrival of Contrast Paints, and hadn’t painted the figures very well, so this was very much a case of smashing out as many “wargames standard” figures as possible as quickly as possible.

The figures are from Essex Miniatures and, as with all Essex ranges, take the paint well even if they are a bit manikin-like sometimes. I painted 88 of the little blighters, in batches of ten, with each batch taking about two hours to do once all the prep work had been done. This is what Contrast Paint is made for!

Here’s a closer look:

First Painting of the Year

Not the start of a new project (they are still in their box!) but a few bits and pieces for existing armies.

First up we have some organ guns for my Burgundian Ordnance army. I had some rockets already, but organ guns are more correct and having the actual models will hopefully remind me that there are special rules that apply to this type of artillery in To The Strongest. I’ve also painted up a couple of pavilions to add a bit of flavour to the Burgundians’ camp bases.

These are from Alternative Armies: very nice sculpts and they arrived very quickly as well.

Next up are a few command figures for my British army for the Crimean War (1854-6). I don’t actually need command figures for the rules I’m playing at the moment (Neil Thomas’ Rules for 19th Century Wargaming) but I find the army looks a bit odd without them. It also helps remind me of which units are in which division.

These are Rank & File figures from Timecast: very nice figures that my somewhat messy painting doesn’t really do justice to.

My next painting will be the start of the first big project for 2023: a 15mm Norman army using the excellent Museum Miniatures CAD range. Can’t wait to get started on them!

Last Painting of 2022

Too late to start a new project, so a couple of bits and pieces rescued from the slopes of the lead mountain.

First up are some more Brute. These are technically 15mm sci-fi figures from Nuclear Shrimp. I say “technically” as they are post-apocalyptic wasteland mutants…so the figures are far more like 25mm than 15mm.

These are a couple of field guns carried on the backs of gorusk beasts of burden. You can see from their eyes and teeth that the poor gorusks are vegetarian herd animals pressed into service by the Brute!

The gorusk were painted with GW Contrast Paints, with the platform and gun painted a base black then dry-brushed in steel and then either a bronze/gold colour (the platform) or a metallic blue (the gun). I then did the chains forming the harness in a bright steel colour to make them really stand out. Fun figures, although I’ve no idea when I’m actually going to use them.

The second bit of painting was a couple of command stands for the Crimean British. You don’t actually need command figures under the Neil Thomas rules that I am using, but I always think it’s nice to have them on the table top, and we will probably come up with a house rule to make them significant. Perhaps having a unit to which a command stand attached always activating at full effect, and having an officer attached to a command stand vulnerable to enemy action in some way. Something simple like that.

So that’s it for painting in 2022. I’ve exceeded my previous record in the Painting Challenge, so I’m happy about that…except, of course, that I now have to do even better next year!

I’ll post the last Painting Challenge update for 2022 on New Year’s Day (I have a handful of entries already in, so don’t hold back submitting your last efforts) and then it’s on to 2023!

Last of the Crimean British

I needed one more infantry unit to finish off my Crimean Brits and, to give me two symmetrical brigades, it needed to be a unit of Guards. Scots Guards to be exact.

I fancied a change from the Rank & File figures that I had been using, so went with the Eureka 18mm range. These would be a little taller than the rest of the army but, hey, I wanted a battalion of imposing Scotsmen so that would do the trick nicely.

The Eureka figures are exquisite: my crude painting certainly does not do them justice. My only complaint would be that the bayonets are extremely thin and I’m quite worried that they will break easily…not that any broke off in the painting process, but then the figures haven’t been handled on the wargames table yet.

The tartan effect on the kilts was achieved by painting the kilt blue then painting a green cross-hatching on it. Again, somewhat crude, but all you need for the three foot rule.

I could have painted these better, but they match the style of the rest of the army. I would also have like to homogenise the poses a bit more, but the Eureka UK distributor was a bit low on stock and I wanted to get these done before the end of the year.

These figures actually now take me to a new personal best score on the TFL Painting Challenge: 2,035 points as opposed to my previous 2,004 points achieved in 2019. I would like to get up to 2,050 before the end of this year’s challenge, but with only eight days to go, some of which are Christmas, it might be a bit tricky!

More Crimean War Brits, and some Scots

As this year’s Painting Challenge draws to a close, I find myself very close to achieving a new high score. Before the below are added, I was on 1,967 points versus my previous record of 2,004 points set in 2019: a mere 37 points apart.

First up today is a another battalion of Crimean War British Line Infantry.

These are Rank & File figures from Timecast: very nice figures that my somewhat messy painting doesn’t really do justice to.

These chaps had quite an adventure. Firstly I varnished them before noticing that the Union flag was missing the red diagonals. Secondly, I had these drying in the garage and managed to acrobatically drop the tray holding them in a spectacular fashion whilst wrestling with the garage door. More speed less haste, as they say! Some time was needed to re-glue half the figures back on the bases and touch up the impact points with fresh paints. Annoying!

Second up is another command stand for my Covenantor Scots:

I’m showing you the back view so that you can see all the lovely tartan! Figures are from Peter Pig.

So that lot give me 36 points in total, meaning I am now only a couple of points under achieving a new record with over three weeks of December still to go…

More Crimean British

The last of the re-basing…

my name is cardigan, what is what, what is wHat!

These represent the 11th Hussars of Balaclava fame, or rather infamy. I had eleven of these already painted, so had to find one more to colour match and paint up.

I painted these myself some twenty years ago and was very proud of them at the time.

Here are all the skirmishing units I will need: naturally composed of Riflemen. These I bought painted

Finally, here’s another battalion of Guards. This is a half-n-half unit: the rear two ranks are composed of Minifigs Guards that I painted some twenty years ago; the front two ranks are newly bought Timecast figures painted up to match. There’s a small difference in size and pose between the two, but nothing that will be noticeable on the tabletop.

Just another unit of standard foot, a Scots battalion, and the commanders to go now: but they will all have to be bought and painted from scratch,

Crimean British Re-Basing Begins

Those who follow this blog will know that I have relatively recently re-based my 19th Century Austrians, Prussians, Russians and French in order to use Neil Thomas’ rules for the period.

The last of my Crimean armies to re-base was therefore the British…but this one would be slightly more complicated than the others.

The last set of rules that I used had the British as so elite that you didn’t really need many of them, so I only had a few infantry units, and cavalry units that were smaller than those of other nations. That meant that although I could easily re-base one unit of line infantry and one unit of Guards, I was a bit stuffed after that!

I had three units of cavalry that were ten figurers strong and I need them all to be twelve figures strong. Worse, I hadn’t actually painted these myself, so would have to match someone else’s painting style.

This was doubly interesting as I would also need to revert to my old style of painting as well: single colours over a black undercoat rather than the Contrast Paints system I use now. In fact, this was two steps back, as immediately before Contrast Paints I was using a base colour, wash plus shading over an undercoat!

As you’ll see from the following two units, the tactic I decided to adopt was to add two figures to the command stand. Here are the light and heavy dragoons. Can you tell which are the two extras?

Okay, so they are a little bit obvious in “catalogue” style pics like the above, but on the tabletop they just look like an exaggerated command stand, so I’m happy.

I also had to re-base the lancers in the same way, but these actually worked out better than the above, as I was able to use figures that almost exactly mimicked the ones I had. This time I really am asking if you can spot the two newbies!

Well perhaps still fairly obvious but, again, doesn’t show up at tabletop distances.

That left me needing to paint up half an infantry unit to match the half that I already had painted. By this time I’d also taken the trouble to work out that I had used Rank & File Miniatures (available through Timecast) and that it was worth buying a whole packet of infantry as the substitution would only leave me eight spare - it had seemed a bit much to buy three packets of cavalry to use just six figures!

The figures arrived very speedily, so kudos to Timecast for that, and I set about painting them. I think I’m a bit out of practice with this style of painting, as my finished versions didn’t look as good as the ones I already had. See what you think:

I suppose they are not too bad and, at wargames distance, they don’t appear that mixed: they just look like a slightly scruffy unit of line infantry…hardly surprising considering the conditions in the Crimea.

So that’s about half the army done now. One more cavalry unit to go (the 11th Hussars), the artillery, and I’ve bought a couple of extra infantry units so that I end up with six in all. Looks like I’m going to get a bit more practice at the obsolete style of painting after all!

Crimean Russians Re-based

Thermopylae, Flanders, the Crimea…it’s the same places that get fought over again and again and again.

Here’s the latest re-basing for my 19th Century collection: the Russian army of the Crimean War, another pointless campaign that achieved far more misery than lasting effect.

I’ve exchanged the existing somewhat esoteric basing scheme for a more ubiquitous version: infantry in units of 32 figures mounted on 40mm wide and 30mm deep bases; cavalry on the same size bases in units of 12 figures.

A right pain in the backside to do, but good for my Painting Challenge score and means that I will get the army onto the tabletop again. Looking at my records, I last used them in anger on 9th March 1999: just over 23 years ago. Ridiculous, but I’m still glad I’ve kept hold of them all this time.

19th Century Prussians Re-Based

Having re-based the Austrians, and liking the results, it was time to have a go at the Prussians.

I had forgotten how brittle the old Freikorps 15 figures are, so I’m afraid we had a few casualties along the way. I lost a handful of infantry and, for some reason, the Lancers just kept snapping off their bases. The infantry I could spare (loads of singly-based skirmishers to plug the gaps!) but it took me quite a bit of effort to re-build the lost Lancers, and even then I’ve made sure the broken figures are the middle of three.

As per yesterday’s post, these figures haven’t seen the light of day for over twenty years, so it’s really nice to see them schroffed up and ready for action again.

That’s 204 foot, 62 mounted and seven guns/limbers/teams done…and a right pain it is too!

Massive Re-Base!

My 19th Century Austrians have been languishing unused for some time: like years! This is partly to do with being occupied with other periods, but also because they are based in a slightly weird fashion.

Let me explain. In my twenties I wrote a set of home-brewed rules that combined Johnny Reb and Trevor Halsall’s set, Rules for Wargames: Sebastopol, Sadowa & Sedan. They were never intended for publication: just for home use. The basing system involved company-sized bases in line, with the correct number of figures at 1:20 ratio. As Austrians, at that time, had 140-man companies (paper strength), this meant I had battalions of six 7-man, strip bases. Looked good on the table, but very inflexible when it came to using other rule sets.

Now, many years on, I have decided to re-base the European armies from my 19th century collection to give me the flexibility I need to play the rules that my set of wargaming friends are playing. It’s a big job, but actually quite satisfying as the armies were based quite crudely: certainly more crudely than I can manage now.

My chosen basing is to mount each infantry or cavalry unit on the equivalent of four 40mm x 30mm bases. The infantry will be mounted on six bases: two 40x30 and four 20x30, with eight and four figures respectively. The cavalry will be mounted on four 40x30 bases, with three figures per base. Infantry skirmishers will go two figures on a 40x30 base, and guns/limbers and officers mounted individually.

First up, as mentioned above, are the Austrians: 172 infantry, 40 horsemen and 13 guns/limbers.

Bases were all from Warbases: excellent service as usual.

I even managed to squeeze an extra infantry unit out of my collection: judicious re-painting of cuffs and collars on spares and extra skirmishers, and adding a flagpole and flag to one infantryman figure.

Next up: the Prussians!

My First Painting of 2021

No games to be had due to COVID, so it was back to the painting table for the first weekend of the new year.

First finished was a unit of Indian javelinmen. I now have enough Classical Indians to field 130 points worth, but adding various other units to the collection will give me a bit of flexibility of army list and allow me to, at a stretch, field other Indian armies such as the Vedics and Tamils.

As with the rest of the collection, these are 15mm Museum Miniatures painted with GW Contrast Paints.

Next up are some odds and ends that I really painted to give myself a rest from the Classical Indians: some 15mm Essex Confederate infantry that I had half painted a number of years ago.

I’m a bit torn with these Rebs: I have about 120 infantry done painted in a very similar fashion to the above. The trouble is, I don’t like them very much! I like the officers that I’ve just finished off, above, using Contrast Paints, but the rank and file that were mostly done using standard acrylics, and mostly done quite badly quite a few years ago, just don’t appeal. Part of the problem is that I like my units looking neat and light, and these look a bit dark and gloomy.

So, what to do? Do I discard the 120 that are done and start again, painting at a better standard than I could manage then, or do I use them as a refresher between other jobs just to get the army done: after all, will I really notice when they are on the table?

Answers on a postcard to the usual e-mail address or as a comment on this post…

Wyevale Winter Trees Bargain

For those of you who hadn't noticed, many garden centres are selling off their winter model Christmas trees.

I had heard about this wondrously cheap way of acquiring snowy terrain for the wargaming table, but hadn't actually seen the proof of the (presumably Christmas) pudding.

Until now.

The wife of a friend picked up the above Battle of the Bulge, winter wonderland forest for me for a mere £13.50: and that's for sixty-one trees! A bargain, and they look to be good quality as well.

For me, unfortunately, this was a false economy, as I now need to buy myself a snow-scene mat for the top of my gaming table...

A Pond...a Very Nice Pond

Second piece of loot from Colours was a pond from Debris of War.

This is shown here with a couple of bases of Polish infantry for scale purposes.

Lovely bit of kit. Not on the Debris of War website, so I'm assuming it was made up just for the show. Whatever, it cost me £10.50 and I'm very happy with it. DoW also do movement trays, resin walls, the odd building: lots of different stuff really, well worth a look.

Expect to see the pond appearing in many AARs to come! 

15mm Buildings from Minibits/RedVectors

First of the loot from Colours: some slightly different buildings to round out my Russian village.

Hadn't seen these before: they are a selection of five laser-cut MDF buildings from a company called RedVectors that market through Minibits.net.

As you can see, there are two different houses, two different open-fronted barns, and a pig pen with fence.

They go together very nicely (not quite as nicely as the 4ground or Sarissa stuff that I have already, but very nicely all the same) and are a great way of adding a bit of variety to your hamlets.

How do they directly compare? Well, I prefer the 4ground roofs, and I think that the RedVector houses look a bit gingerbread, but the open-fronted barns and big pen are just fantastic. Here's a couple of comparison shots with a 4ground Russian shack:

Yes, they look a bit different...but not enough to matter on the 15mm wargames table. I shall probably use the barns and pigpen all the time, and save the houses for when I need to represent a hetman's hut or something different to the run-of-the-mill shacks.

As regards price, the five buildings together cost me £18, or about £3.50 each. 4ground come in at a whopping £8.50 for one house, down to about £7 each for their collections. Yes, 4ground are "better" (more detailed, I prefer the roofs) but £18 for five buildings is a really, really great price.

Incidentally, the RedVector/Minibits buildings also come in a ruined variety, at £15 per pack:

In all, these get a huge thumbs-up from me: a change to the 4ground buildings; I love the open-fronted barns and pigpen; and the price is excellent.

Highly, highly recommended.

More Goodness from MBA

Regular visitors to this site will know that a month or so ago I took advantage of the 50%-off Miniature Building Authority sale to order some 15mm terrain from the US. See the post by clicking here (will open in new window).

I was so pleased with the buildings, and the fact that the 50%-off made them affordable to buy from the US, that I decided I'd better get some more in order to make my middle eastern town a bit bigger. A few clicks later, and I had another of the compounds and four more little houses on the way.

Whilst I was on the site, a couple more of the buildings caught my eye, and I duly ordered some of them too: manufacturers take note: all you have to do is get me there!

First up is the sawmill. Great little building this, and ideal for one of the scenarios in Bashnya or Bust! Unfortunately, the site said it was out of stock, but an e-mail to Kirk (good man that he is) led to him uncovering one deep in the recesses of the warehouse.

A nice little building, quite distinctive, that comes with a couple of piles of wood (okay, so they are a bit pants!) and some fencing to make an outside area. Loving this: will make any wooden Russian town or village a bit more interesting.

The next thing to catch my eye was the MBA Russian church. I'd coveted one of these for some time, but the problem is I already have at least three (it might be four, I deliberately forget!) Russian churches. If I bought this one, I was well on the way to having enough to portray a different church in each of the various towns and villages  in all 32 of the Bashnya and, indeed, all the Vyazma, scenarios as well. I definitely did not need another Russian church.

So here is my new MBA Russian church proudly sitting on the tabletop:

Another lovely model that comes with two gold crosses for the steeple: a really nice touch as I am bound to break or lose one over the next few years.

Here are the two buildings together rather than in isolation, and you can see the new middle eastern kit behind them as well:

So how did the financing work out this time?

Using an exchange rate of $1.30:£1.00, here's the calculation, rounded to single units for ease of consumption:

  • List price: $290 (£223)
  • 50% off: $145 (£112)
  • P&P:  $85 (£65)
  • Tax: $36 (£28)
  • Total Paid: $266 (£205)

So a saving of around £20...and I have some very nice buildings that are usually only available (due to cost) in the States.

The MBA sale is still on, click on the banner below to visit their site. Please mention VL if you do end up buying: I've already received one angry e-mail from a spouse about the money spent by her other half the last time I posted about MBA!

Crimean War British Gallery

Inspired by having to convert all my other 19th Century galleries from web-pages to blog-posts (see my post Page Limit Panic below), I have finally got around to posting up the gallery of my 15mm Crimean War Brits.

This army is a mix of units that I had professionally painted, and some of the best 'block painting' jobs that I managed myself e.g. Lord Cardigan ("what is what, what is what") and the 11th Hussars.

Click on the picture below to see the whole gallery:

A Rather Useful Tool

I was in my local Games Workshop the other day, stocking up on various paints after the Christmas break, and was idling chatting to the store manager about various painting techniques and the like.

As I was popping a pot of one of their texture basing 'paints' onto the counter, I happened to mention that I used old paint brushes to apply the texture. Ah, said the manager, you should use one of these:

Now I'm all for having the right tools for the job, but this seemed a bit excessive, especially as that finely carved bit of plastic will set you back £5.

However, I was using up a voucher, and had enough left over to indulge, so I thought I'd get one and try it out...especially as I was fully expecting to be disappointed and have the opportunity to be suitably obnoxious about it next time I was in (what is it about GW stores that make me want to be obnoxious? I don't know: but it's true of all of them!).

Anyway, turns out I was wrong. I used this to base the Israeli half-tracks I posted about yesterday, and it really makes the job a hell of a lot easier that using an old paint brush, even when you attempt to carve said old paint brush into a suitable shape. I would go as far to say that that bit of plastic is the best thing as a basing tool since, er, sliced bread.

So, as compensation to GW for being prepared to doubt their products before I've even tried them, I'm posting about their tool here, and recommending one to everyone who needs to smear a bit of basing material onto a base!

Page Limit Panic!

This website is built on the Squarespace platform: very arty, very reliable, easy to use, and more than just blog functionality. Highly recommended for this sort of hobby site that needs a bit more than a pure blogging platform can offer.

I pay the $180 a year to have up to 1,000 pages and was somewhat surprised when, on coming to build the pages for this year's TFL Painting Challenge, I was told that I had reached my limit.

I can't have built 1,000 pages!

Of course, it turns out that I have. Two hundred pages for previous painting challenge galleries, five hundred pages of individual after action reports, all the different articles, army galleries and scenarios: it all adds up.

So what to do?

I contacted Squarespace and said "help"!

Their (very helpful) customer service chap couldn't give me any more pages, but pointed out that I was using the platform in quite an old-fashioned way: using web-pages rather than blog-posts for my content...a bit like producing a daily newspaper on super-high quality gloss paper rather than newsprint. 

He suggested that as Squarespace gives you unlimited blog posts, and that a blog post contains most if not all of the functionality of a web-page, if I was a bit clever about navigation and presentation, then I could actually archive a lot of my web-pages onto blog posts, thus significantly freeing things up.

Not only that, but Squarespace has various 'summary' functionalities that can group and present blog posts in a very pleasing way, and would actually save me the trouble of having to build second tier navigation pages line by line: I could just pop in a 'summary' block and the machine would do it for me.

Now the above makes me sounds positively antediluvian (hilarious, as I work in media and spend a lot of my time working on the commercial side of some very large publication websites) but as I sat and played with Squarespace, I realised that, as regards Vis Lardica, I was still in very much a pre-blogosphere mind-set.

So, gradually, over the next few months, I shall be migrating content as Squarespace suggest.

Trouble is, of course, this is very time-consuming and actually quite annoying: it's the web-designer equivalent of re-basing!

I've already spent four hours working out how best to present just one small part of the site (see below), and another four hours actually migrating the content. New areas will be built a la blog, but moving the old will take some time.

So, first area migrated is the gallery of my 19th Century (Waterloo to Mons) figures. Here, the navigation page is effectively a blog, with each different gallery being a different blog post, and with the links to the different galleries coming from a Summary content block. 

Click here to go to the navigation page and let me know what you think. I've also revamped the look and feel of the titling as well: always good to refresh look and feel occasionally!

Vis Imperica: The Mahdists

As mentioned yesterday, the bank holiday gave me a chance to continue photographing my collection of little soldiers. After the Egyptians, it seemed appropriate that the Mahdists were next under the spotlight.

The Mahdists, or Ansar if you like, are one of the earliest 15mm armies that I actually painted myself. Fresh out of university, determined that 15mm 19th century gaming was what I wanted to do, I spent a ridiculous amount of money on a beautifully painted, second hand Zulu army, and then painted (badly) a whole lot British figures to fight them. Once they were done, and I'd had enough of Brits vs Zulu games, I decided that the next conflict to model were the various Sudan campaigns.

I'd also heard about this marvelous new painting technique called dipping or washing, where you roughly painted a figure (phew!) and then covered it in brown wash or magic dip. This I could manage, so away I went and produced the figures you can see below. 

Now almost thirty years old, you can see how dark they are: at that time I didn't know the maxim "paint 15s one shade lighter than you would anything larger" that has recently seen me in good stead. The finish I use has also darkened over time. But, as I said, at the time these were the best figures I'd ever produced. You can also see how I've more recently added some command figures that are painted with highlights rather than wash: good to see how one's painting technique improves over time!

Click on the pic below to see all:

Vis Imperica: 19th Century Egyptians

Bank holiday weekend and a chance to take another few steps towards finishing the photography of all my 19th century figures. First up were the Egyptians from about 1875 - 1900.  

I had forgotten how much I like the look of my Egyptian troops until I got them out of storage in order to photograph them. I have a soft spot for troops in fezs: I think it must be something to do with Jon Courtney Grimwood's Arabesk trilogy!

My Egyptian force consists if two brigades, with each brigade having the same composition: three battalions of infantry, a squadron of cavalry, and a couple of guns. 

These days, as I don't play much 19th Century at the moment, my Egyptians will probably find themselves proxy-ing as Libyans for my Operation Compass games...but at least they'll be on the table! Click on the pic below to see all: