Converted Napoleonics WIP

Yesterday evening I had another very pleasant video chat with Dave and Martin during which I kept working on my conversion unit for our Egypt 1801 game at Tactica 2017:

Work in progress

Basically I'm using the Perry Napoleonic British plastics as well as their AWI sets for British and Continental infantry. Those combined give the figures themselves in somehow unusual poses. For our presentation game I wanted to create something special so those and some additional chaps will form a unit which takes a small rest after the exhausting landing at Aboukir. Alan Perry himself inspired me to this conversion project with a Facebook post he published lately.

But a view conversions have to be made to make them credible:

Since the Napoleonic figures have the post-1805 trotter backpack I decided to remove its straps and add a trumpline instead. From my personal point of view that gives them a kind of early war look. Pretty useful for 1801.

Anyway since the cartridge boxes and the water bottles are part of the trotter piece I needed to cut them from the backpack and glue them directly onto the figure.

Luckily the remaining parts of the 1808-1815 figures work rather well because the stovepipie shakos was worn in Egypt as were such trousers or overalls.

On the other hand I didn't want to use 24 trumplines and leave all the AWI troopers without baggage. Thus I decided to make some of the parts I needed by myself. To accomplish this I used an incredible stuff called 'Instant Mold'. Very useful but more on that in another post.

The figures above are pretty much finished but I need to add the shoulder tufts for center companies. Currently I'm not sure how to add flank company soldiers. Most probably I'm not able to sculpt the shoulder wings myself so I'll need to work around that somehow...

Shrubbery from Rubberised Horsehair

A while ago our fellow Dave presented an excellent tutorial about making hedgerows out of rubberised horshair. Actually it's a stuff from upholstery business but in the days of disposable low-budget furniture and synthetic padding it's pretty unusual. Due to this I foundered on acquiring this stuff until Dave kindly and generously sent me some of his clippings. Actually a pretty large amount of horsehair so I'll be able to tart my NWF collection up with enough shrubbery for a medium sized battlefield. Many thanks again, Dave!

Finally during those holiday weeks I managed to try working with the stuff and prepared a couple of test pieces myself. 

1.) Bases:

As most of us I have a pretty large amount of those green plastic bases which are supplied with the Perry plastics. Now I found a proper use for them and employed a couple of them as bases for my shubbery test pieces. For this I simply unsprued a couple of them and rounded the edges. Not perfect but sufficient for test pieces. For the real terrain pieces of course the shape should be much more irregular.

Back from holiday - Workbench snapshot

Ten days by the sea went by in a flash!

The family and me were in East Frisia since 11th August and spent a wonderful time of temporal deceleration there. The weather was rather fine and we enjoyed a couple of excellent day trips with the kids: Bicycle rides, a short cruise trip and a trip to the German shipping museum in Bremerhaven for example. About the last one I'll spread a couple of words here.

But now back to the workbench!

While we were on holiday my kit of a Hamilton gunboat by Laser Dreamworks arrived and I was very happy to find it on our doorstep just. So this MDF beauty will be one of the next pieces on my workbench. Nevertheless there is the next batch of NWF British to be finished before the ship:

As you see they are nearly finished but they need some highlights here and there and some finishing touches. Most probably I'll be able to present them later this week.

Until then enjoy your weekend !

66th for NWF - Perry British Infantry 1877 - 1885

Ten days gone since my last post. Holidays are really a hustle... Currently I'm having my yearly summer holiday and we spend part of it at home but part of it in East Frisia by the sea as well. Although I enjoy any time out and especially having time for the family things tend to go somehow stressful to hang around together all the time. Particularly when the girls are missing their common playfellows. However there'll be a couple of day trips to mention here...

During the last days my blog crawled over the 300,000 hits step nearly unnoticedly. Many thanks for your recurring interest in my humble pieces of work!

Be sure that I'll cover this step in a seperate post and I'll create a appropriate raffle for that. But I have to postpone this in the aftermath of our holiday.

But now in medias res. Actually this day's post was meant to introduce and review the rather new plastic set by Perry Miniatures. The spring after Salute the twin published a set I'd been waiting for since it was announced last year: British Infantry 1877 - 1885.

As you know the Great Game and the 2nd Anglo-Afghan War have been keeping my attention for a while. So I didn't wait too long until I assembled and prepare a couple of those figures. Finally the first five are finished and I wanted to take the chance to show you the set as a whole.

As most of you might know the plastics come as a box of 36 multi-part 28mm figures. Once again they come in a handy box with a tremendous artwork by Peter Dennis:

Zombicide: Black Plague - Lady Faye

The forth and for now last survivor for Zombicide: Black Plague (Z:BP) I painted recently is Lady Faye:

Zombicide: Black Plague - Xuxa

Let's proceed with the parade of survivors. After Brother James and Lucas here comes the third figure for Zombicide: Black Plague I painted recently:

Xuxa