72nd Highlanders - Unit completed. Finally!

My apologies for being absent lately but besides some more zombies I tackled a trio of figures that took a bunch of time. Finally I managed to finish the last three daring scotsmen for my NWF highlanders:

The last trio...

Once again it took a while but you know how lousily slow I'm painting from time to time.

... and from another angle.

So now we have the second unit for NWF finished after those more or less generic Brits I painted more than a year ago (here). In addition there'll follow those wonderful new Perry plastics, some mounted troops, artillery and whatever seduces me to complete the collection:

The whole unit of twelve figures.

And yours truly is desperately lacking terrain as you see. Another project on the long list of mine... Rather soon I'll start experimenting with some rubberised horsehair. A incredibly generous blogging fellow send me some of his remains and I'm looking forward to test the stuff. Unfortunately it's rather difficult or extremely expensive to get in Germany...

However let me make some words about the unit I tried to bestow honour with my humble skills. The 72nd Regiment of Foot also known as The Duke of Albany's Own Highlanders was raised in Scotland by the loyalist Kennth Mackenzie, the Earl of Seaforth, in 1778 (in those days numbered the 78th). After some time in home service the regiment took an oversea deployment to the East Indies from 1781 - 1798. During these years they took part in the 2nd Anglo-Mysore War and added their first battle honours to their colours. Meanwhile renumbered 72nd Regiment of Foot they returned to England to collect reinforcements. During the later Napoleonic Wars the 72nd fought in Africa and India but didn't join direct confrontation with the small Corsican.

Again.

During the following decades the 72nd fulfilled several tours of duty, mostly to Africa but performing police duties Ireland and England as well. Especially during the Preston Strike in 1842 they gathered questionable fame when shooting down the strike killing four workers and injuring a further three.

Later they fought in the Crimean War, in the Indian Mutiny and took duties in the whole Empire: Gibraltar, West Indies, Ireland, Scotland, England, India and - of course - Afghanistan during the 2nd Anglo-Afghan War. Finally in 1881 the regiment was linked with the (new) 78th Regiment to form the 1st and 2nd Battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders.

And once more.

To be honest this regiment caught me especially because of its very special appearance. As far as I know they were the only regiment wearing tartan trews and tartan puttees during the 2nd Anglo-Afghan war. The more I though about it the more I was delighted by the idea to try to recreate this fashion in 28mm. 

Perry Miniatures sealed my fate with producing those wonderful figures as well as the inspirational examples of some of our fellow bloggers. I mentioned them when I started this unit but I shouldn't do any harm to repeat my muses (now with links to their blogs...):
Firstly 'Mad Guru' who is running the 'Maiwand Day' blog, then my friend Michael who has been working on his very own NWF collection for years, then to the most honourable Michael Awdry esq. who's fueling any interest in Victorian warfare on his wonderful blog and last but not least to Mark Hargreaves and Darrell Hindley for their priceless advice regarding the uniform colours. And of course many thanks to all of you who encouraged me with your kind comments earlier!

Picture from 'Maywand Day' blog.

As usual I used mostly Vallejo Model Colors for those chaps. The skin is once again painted with the excellent Wargames Foundry paint set. As you see the bases aren't completely finished. That's because I chose to take the pictures before applying varnish.

After all I'm more than satisfied with how they turned out. It was a great experience to work with them and I hope not to sound presumptuous when I say that I was able to broaden my horizon during this project.