Saturday, December 30, 2006

Blazing brushes!

A full day of painting!



First horses manes tails and bridles.



Then all shakos, helmets, bicornes and (just so that Jeff will remember!) Bonaparte's tricorne.

Then in the afternoon, a set of time for shabraques, and mid-tones on all tunics and dolmans.



Finnally this evening the facings, vests much of the plumes and turnbacks all got their colors.



All that remains is the 'higlights' and detail finishing.

I may yet get all this done in December!

Thursday, December 28, 2006


Trying a new thing for the blog with a template change, since many had complained about the dark background and similarly dark text on it.

Along with the change I am trying this 'new' background image.

I will upload it here and see if all works!
All undercoats done.



With a day of relative calm, and no more rampaging sickness in the house, I managed to get all the undercoats done.




The block colors on all minis are in place and, provided the calm continues, I may have this batch of troops done by Saturday.



Enjoy the pics.
The 'under coat' colors and all the greens have been done.



Then Daddy daycare took over a while.





Then I got to the faces of all the troops, Bony and the boys.



I started on the inking process, but a crying baby son took up the balance of the night.
Gingerbread House

We started a new family tradition this year.



This was the first creation.

'nuff said.

Monday, December 25, 2006



Festive celebrations cause the 'interrupt', along with a dose of winter flu (just for fun).

I did manage to get a first layer on all the mounts, and green onto most of the units tunics that call for it as ta base color (almost all of them).


Still more green to do and of course all the horses.

This will come in the next 2 days, with a suitable gap (in the real world problems) and I may even see all the horse done and a major lump on the riders.

Been studying more on Murat, and I think this image sums up the plans for him.

Merry Ho-HO and a happy Hiccup!

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

No brushwork done yet, as the Empress Dragoons needed to have the saddles 'ground-down' otherwise the riders would all be 'canted forwards' over their mounts.

Since I needed to wait for the glue to dry on them I thought I would also 'grind-out' the saddles and extras on the dozen mounts needed for the squadron of "BIG BOOTS" French Grenadiers a cheval. The riders are already painted Hinchcliffe models I got off eBay for about $0.25 per fig. All that they needed were a dozen horses. So I have cast them and now need to clean and modify the mounts since the Prince August figs have the riders without saddles and Hinchcliffe has the riders and saddles together.


I have painted Bonaparte before, in 15mm, so I thought this might be as good a place as any to show off my older brushwork and mention the Waterloo Campaign Game(s) that I have run in the past.

The game is loosely based on Napoleon, as designed by Tom Dalgleish, now of Columbia Games. With the borrowed map and move concept. The battles are then faught-out using my own De Bellis Napoleone (basically a Hordes of the Things - with mods), the players give general battlefield directions based on a map and a 3-d 'picture' that gets sent to them. All games are played out via email.

The images here are of a battlefield in action from the 1st version of the game played in 2002.

Monday, December 18, 2006

A big thank-you to Stokes for the counter idea and now the MarauderS page has a nifty little counter in it also.


Started at 0 on December 18, 2006.
Challenge of challenges!

I have started on the December plan of painting Napoleon Bonaparte, Marshals Murat, Soult, Ney and some ADC's

Just in case I cannot find the energy to face the painting of these Grand Armee Commanders I also have 4 units of Dragoons one of Empress Dragoons and one of Imperial Guard Chasseurs as well as 10 Russian batteries with 30 gunners and 6 Russian Horse gunners (to man the two 'extra' guns from the former Russian Guard Batteries).

I'll now see if some pictures can be added to this new blog.

This posting was tried about a week ago and was drafted much, much better than this one - sorry I have been frustrated by the constant refusals of the system to accept my posting(s) and pictures. I'll be sure to 'improve' once the postings continue to be 'accepted'.

Cheers
Still trying to get a posting to work under the 'beta' version.

Hope this one goes thru.

Did not get much done on the minis over the weekend as I needed to solve other real world problems.

Sigh, if the real world would just stop getting in the way I could have more fun!