English Civil War - Cuirassier or Heavy Horse or "The Lobsters"

A mighty gift from Jeff (of Saxe-Bearstein fame) for Yule in 2014 was a Warlord Games set of Cuirassier, for I was working on the Army of Parliament and Jeff was doing the Royalist muster.

The Cuirassier unit of most note in the ECW was Heselrig's Lobsters, which performed field duties for Parliament.

It has taken me many years to finally break them out from the box again and this year I was determined to have them finished.  For now with Rob of Codsticker's Historicals we are continuing the English Civil War project that Jeff and I started.

Enough of the background now onto the work:

bare metal

mounted on fender washers, the plastic horses were then put onto wood spacers that I use to hold the minis while painting, the riders are mounted onto cut card, then 'combined' once ready for the (now) matte coating

after grey base, the mix of black & brown paint is liberally applied

a white 'damp-brush' layer on everything to pick out highlights

reds, oranges and yellows for the horse and equipment 'under color'

inks to capture the details

second inking for the horses and cloths are colored, as the riders get more attention to detail, for many of the riders in the armor, I did a mix of 'black' and 'burnished' metal looks along with a brown 'rusted' look that was achieved historically by actually exposing the bare metal then using a varnish 'polish' to lock in the red-brown coloring - I did it with a mix of thinned out silver with lots of brown ink.

horse blankets get details and the riders get final highlights

transfer to horses for the matte coating

final product now on the magnetic stands (flash photo)

 
At long last my heavy horse is ready, just in time too as Rob and I will be moving forward this spring with the ECW war in the west campaign.  A battle coming that calls for none other than Heselrig's own!

English Civil War Dragoons & Horses at rest

With a busy winter schedule I have not taken the time to document all of the painting that has been done.  I finished the pirates in January and after looking at the coming games planned in the English Civil War period there is an acute need for more dragoon miniatures and for horses that are not yet mounted or as horses 'held' back from where the dragoon line was fighting.

This set of dragoons were done from the last week of January to the 10th of February, then had to wait for dry weather to get their matte coating.  Yes matte coating, I am in the process of re-coating all of the English Civil War miniatures with a matte coat since it appears they photograph better when along side the matte finish of Rob's many troops and wonderful buildings.

2 sets of 'horses at rest' to be used as held horse

two more sets of 'horses held'

Royalist Dragoons

Parliamentary Dragoons

That catches me up on the painting, next will be the two campaign battles of Stratton and Glastonbury that have been played over the winter of 2019-20; where history was changed ...

Pirates Painting English and Spanish

Been a while since I posted about the painting progress over the past few months.

This December 2019, I started on 54 pirates from the wonderful Firelock Games for the Blood & Plunder game system.

The detail and research on these minis is really beyond comparison with others that I have encountered.

The minis are a bit larger in scale and have wood textured bases, so the finishing process takes longer.

In this posting I shall cover the finished product then some of the working done to reach this end.

a closeup of the whole English Pirates crew

There are some feature officers, including one Henry Morgan:

with flash

without flash

Then there's an officer that comes as part of the pirates crew boxed set:

English Officer

Then the crew:

militia

freebooters

sea dogs and forlorn hope

Then a shot of all of the English:

the whole English crew

Done at the same time were the Spanish pirates:

again there's a special officer, Manuel Rivero de Pardal:

with flash

without flash

Then the officer that is part of the boxed set

Spanish Officer

Then the Spanish crew:

lanceros

marineros and indios milicianos

milicianos

My wide angle shot of the whole Spanish forces were all out of focus (grr)

Progress of the minis below, as you can see getting a good photo of bare metal is really hard.

bare metal

base coat and 'dark brown' mix that I put under nearly all of my military minis

highlights and then color blocking

inking

color definition and boost

detail works

Finally there were two extra officers that came because of the web special order that I did to obtain these first forces:

I have turned them into somewhat particular pirates for planned games:

Orion Pirates

King George III Map Collection

An amazing resource, the map collection of King George III in digital form:

LINK to Maps of King George III

Just one section of many in this amazing collection.

Interestingly there were only 10 maps (or documents really) for the War of the Three Kingdoms.
or English Civil War

just a piece of the detail from the Battle of Edgehill