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:

Within the box there are two command frames with three figures each and five frames with five common infantrymen each:

As usual for Michael's and Alan's work the figures are well detailed and full of live. All the figures share the P1870 Valise equipment, the puttees and the Martini Henry rifle. All iconic pieces shown in the British campaigns at the North West Frontier during the 1870s and early 80s as well as in the Sudan shortly afterwards. To suit both campaigns there are two sets heads included. One set with a puggree as worn in the Sudan and one set with a helmet cover as worn during the 2nd Anlgo-Afghan War. This makes the set rather useful for most colonial enthusiasts but makes them useless for the British campaign in Zulu land. However luckily Michael is working on another set of plastics for that theatre of war although there isn't a date of released announced yet.

Anyway Michael created an excellent set of sculpts and made some really wonderful models. Although there are a couple of companies who have 28mm figures for the NWF during the 1880s these are my favourites. They are really detailed although some of the bits and pieces could have been accentuate slightly deeper. Due to this you have to take some more time for the first few models to find the right path to paint them but then there whole richness of details unfolds.

As usual the twin deliver a booklet with painting advice, historical background and examplary sets of colours. Especially the latter are very useful since currently there's no company producing colours for these conflicts as far as I know.

So I'm really more than satisfied with the box and I couldn't wait to bring some of them alive. Thus I assembled half the box meaning 18 figures who were meant to serve as some of the brave men of the 66th Regiment of Foot during the Battle of Maiwand. During a two hour airbrush session I undercoated them and applied a thin coat of Vallejo Game Colour 'Khaki'.

After that it took a while until I found the time to finish them but last week the job was done. At least five of the boys are finished and after varnishing them I'll put some static grass or clump foliage onto their bases. Habitually I take pictures of the finished figures before applying varnish because even matt varnish tends to give them a shine which I don't like on photos.

Although I'm still working on some other pieces as well those plastics - and the corresponding metals - will become a constant guest on my workbench. They are a wonderful combination of rather plain uniforms without trumpery and the chance to put efforts and character in faces and such.