From BobV: Two SYW Brigades [Overdue and Returns] (320 points)

 Hello again all!

As I am sure some of you can sympathize, I have a lot of unpainted lead. My goal for this challenge is to finish off all of my unpainted 18mm Napoleonics. So far I've succeeded in finishing off a couple of brigades and I am within sight of reaching my goal with just a couple of brigades left. However, the monotony of painting only Napoleonics was risking my mojo and I decided that I needed to break out something else to keep my interest up and keep me going. I am aware that one might argue that the similarities between armies only 50 or so years apart are too minuscule to make any difference in interest, but I'll get to that point in a minute.

In addition to my Napoleonic armies, I have a decent collection of unpainted SYW armies. This portion of the collection goes back more than 30 years. My painted figures from this collection are old minifigs that were painted as a newlywed on our then new glass top coffee table (yes I painted at great risk). The remaining unpainted figures have resided in an old dusty box since the late 80's. I believe that qualifies for the Overdue Library Section Bonus. To rejuvenate  my painting spirit, I decided to break them out and see what I could do with them.

Here is the initial now completed batch:  

There are at total of 12 battalions of 15mm Prussians and Austrians. (144 figures). Each side has four battalions of line and two battalions of grenadiers. I am unsure of the manufacturer but I believe that the figures are from Old Glory. I have no recollection of who made the flags.  

SYW has always been one of my favorite eras to to study, paint and game. The era was at the cusp of modern organized armies and thus balances the uniformity of regimental dress and the variety of independent units. I enjoy the wider variety of uniform choices and the flair of colors and lace. It may not seem like it to some, but this set was much more fun to paint than the my last brigade of simple redcoats. 

These figures are based for Tod Kershners's Warfare in the Age of Reason Rules. The rule set has always been one of my favorites. It was a gift from my father. He wasn't a huge fan of my hobby but I did convince him to visit the Emperor's Headquarters in Chicago once when he was on a business trip. He was much more excited about the sausage he found in the Emperor's Polish neighborhood than he was about visiting "some damn hobby shop" but he made the effort and that set of rules remains special to me to this day. Here are some closer photos:

These need a bit more work before I am completely happy with them. The flag edges need painting and some other minor clean up, but for the most part they are ready to go on campaign.

For Points I am claiming the following

144 15mm Infantry @ 2 pts    =                                       288 Points

 Bonus points for Overdue Section of the Library =          20 Points

                                                                                  Total 308 Points

I'll be back again soon with more Napoleonics. Happy Monday.

Sylvain: Lovely stands of figurines! The old esthetics of rows of similarly posed miniatures has its charm. I will add a few points (12) for all the flags waved by your units. I enjoyed reading about your risky business of painting on the new coffee table and the good will of your father who found some kind of compromise between sausages and wargaming. Awesome painting job!

from RayR - The Chamber of Challenge - The Hall of Heroes - Frederick the Great - 30 pts

 

The Hall of Heroes: A location for heroes and the heroic things they do.

My first wargaming period I ever painted was the Seven Years War long, long ago.

It was pre-Reject days and as a group (the same group of pals) we painted up armies for the Age of Reason Campaign .They were all 15mm and I painted up the British and Russians, not the Prussians, they were painted up by Reject Richard.

I bought and read countless books on the period. The main man and

 Hero of the war has got to be Frederick the Great, he's called The Great for a reason!

The figure is from Front Rank and will earn me 10 points

plus 20 points for the bonus, making a total of

30 points

From PeterD Navarre Regiment SYW 28mm (122 points)

I am working away on my task for the Snowlord, but also have some bits and bobs from stuff left mostly completed before submitting.  In this case I had all of the figures painted before I hit the summit, but I hadn't based them.

In my terms this is a paint bomb, maybe my largest ever point total.  It's a full 24 man battalion of the Navarre Regiment from the French Army for Seven Years War project.  Navarre was one of the oldest regiments in the French army, dating back to 1558 but not joining the French Army until Henri IV because King.  They served in Western Germany from 1757-1762 and took part in most of the big battles.

He doesn't show well here but I really like the Crusader drummer.  The  standard bearer in the front rank is from Front Rank

Close up of the Grenadiers.  The NCO pointing is Front Rank.

You can see the variations in Crusader's marching figures.  The office waving his hat  is FR.

Normally I roll my battalions out in three lots of 8 so as to keep up the image of progress, so a 24 man posting is rare for me.  I had planned to do the same here, but when I finished the first lot I realized that I was out of the bases I use for this project.  Challenger Byron of https://northernlightsterrain.com/ sourced me some free of charge (thanks Byron) on his most recent trip to Regina, but which time I had all 24 set to be based.  My Sarissa order has since arrived so I'm now Covid-19 prepared with bases.

Figures are Crusader mostly with a few Front Rank command figures.  I've done most of the unit with turn backs but added a few figures with coats undone for variety.  There's the normal command treats, two drummers in King's Livery, two flags (sourced from a gamer blog and printed at home) and a grenadier stand.  The grenadiers are over represented in the unit as there should be only 1-2 in the 24  man unit but I like the bearskins. I like to think that fusiliers were detached to guard the camp, perform picket duties etc upping the proportion of grenadiers in the main unit.

The Crusader and Front Rank figures both paint up nicely.  I like the Crusader private soldier figures with their subtle mix of related poses and the drummers are nice.  However, Crusader's officer, NCO and and standard bearers are a little static and low key so I often sub in replacements from Front Rank.  The two companies work ok to my aging and fading eyes.

Points wise that's 24 figures @ 5 point a pop for a grand total of 120, which leaves me almost exactly at my Challenge target of 500 points.  There's more stuff in progress plus the Snowlord's Challenge so I'll make my target with some room to spare.

lovely unit, especially now they all agreed to have their picture published

Martin

From PeterD 28mm SYW Hanoverians for Sander's Sand Dunes (70 points)

So far my posts have been mostly focused on my odd little naval projects plus other odds and sods.  This time a round I am returning to the project that occupied almost my entire Challenge IX the Seven Years' War. 

For Sander's Sand Dunes the requirement is RED and it think that these 8 Hanoverian infantry men fit the bill.  These guys are from Hanoverian Battalion 4B known by the inhaber's name, which was Marschalk until the end of 1760 and Crashaur after that.  I tend to complete these units in three batches of eight, and this is the third batch stated but the second completed for the regiment.  Batch 1 was posted late in AHPC IX.  Batch 2 was primed in time for that Challenge and started over the summer but languished about 75% done by the start of this year's affair.  Hopefully I'll get them finished once this year's madness is over.

Once again these are 28mm Front Rank SYW figures and very nice to paint up.

That's 8 28mm foot figures @5 points each plus the location bonus for a 70 point total.  Plus I get to update my map...

And my scout badge collection...

From DaveD - Peter , note how I have not deleted anything ...not even that bottom picture! A fine entry for Sander's Sand Dune

From TamsinP: 15mm SYW Russians (110 points)

As many of you know, one of my ongoing bouts of megalomania long-term projects has been to paint every regiment of the Russian army which took part in the Seven Years War. Earlier this year I painted the last nine regiments of line infantry and had finished the regular cavalry a couple of years ago. That just leaves me with a few odds and ends to do, so this might be the very last time you see a post for this project during the Challenge. But have no fear - there will be doubtless be more megalomania projects to replace this one in the future.

All that is left for me to add now are Suvalov's Observation Corps (that will be two "regiments" of grenadiers, eight of musketeers and some artillery), Cossacks (one can never have enough of them), more generals and some converged grenadiers. speaking of the last two...


Converged Grenadiers

That's two more units of the blighters. At some point I'll need another two.


Generals

Back in August our club did a refight of Kunersdorf - I supplied all the Russians apart from the Observation corps and some Cossacks. It became evident that I didn't have enough "generals" to act as brigade commanders, so I thought I'd better add some.

The chaps in cloaks will be used as infantry brigade commanders, the cloakless ones as cavalry and artillery brigade commanders. Here's a pic of my generals collection in their storage:

Looking at that pic tells me that I might need to add some more "division" commanders.  Adding those to the list might mean there will be a SYW Russian entry from me in AHPC XI. I should probably also do a C-in-C base and maybe some hussars acting as messengers. OK, I give in - there will almost certainly be an entry for this project next time around.

All the figures are 15mm from Essex Miniatures.

For scoring:

36 x 15mm foot @ 2 = 72 points
9 x 15mm mounted @ 4 = 36 points

Total = 108 points

***

A great project and a worthy one for you to attempt as well!  However, if you really want to label this as a monomaniacal project, I would suggest you have to do it in 1:1 figure:real life men count!  Come on Tamsin, are you up to the challenge????

All kidding aside, they look awesome and it is a very cool project.  I love the look of all of your ranked up 15mm figures, they look amazing, and it boggles my mind how you a) deal with all those damn finicky uniforms in 15mm and b) how you stay on topic with such a large project.  I have far too much gamer ADHD to deal with any large project anymore, and when I do, its 10-20 models for project X then sidetracked, then back, then sidetracked.... rinse and repeat, then at some point just completely squirrel out and leave it 75% done forever....

I envy your ability to stick to a project of this size and get it done, and for that rounded your score to 110 points.

- Byron

From PeterD: SYW Wrap Up Hessian Garrison Battalion (42 points)

Full Regiment, but only eight were painted this challenge.

Wow, last post of the Challenge!  I have several projects on the go, but with minor issues to be worked to on all of them I went with finishing these guys off to get a final post in before it's all over.  I could knock myself out to finish some others, but I've found that I work much if I keep things in balance.  They'll get done later this spring when I work out basing for my mounted dragoons, get the right colours on my dismounted dragoons breeches and fix my kitbashing of a house!

I'm wondering what book the officer is reading.

I have completed 8 members of the Hessian Garisson Regiment Kutzleben (as it was known in 1760) for my SYW project.  Some challengers might remember that I painted up 13 of these guys back in 2017 and I thought I'd add a couple of stands to bring it up to a better strength.  They also have a command stand with officer, standard bearers and drummer.

Figures are from the Perry AWI range, Hessians and command at rest.  The sculpts have lovely poses with a definite Sears Catalogue menswear feel to them and I've used them for a few projects along the way.  I had none of the big flash issues that others complain about with Perry figures, but having started on Airfix soft plastics my tolerance level is probably higher than some.  I do wish that the faces had a bit more definition to them however.  Purists could come up with differences between AWI and SYW uniforms, but for Hessians they are pretty minor plus the Perry AWI range is gorgeous.

Flags are home creations, pictures downloaded off Kronoskaf, resized and then printed at home.

This unit was raised as a Militia battalion, then became a Garisson regiment in 1760 and by wars end had become a full time regular unit.  Originally these battalions were raised to allow the regular units to go off and fight for their British paymaster, but with the French over running Hesse-Cassel several times they got pulled into the fighting themselves.   

I love the drummer getting some fife practice in during down time.

My SYW project started as a Sharp Practice Affair 2-3 yers ago as a way to do some SYW uniforms without going full in.  However, I found that I really enjoyed the Lace Wars period and it kept expanding to the point where it out grew SP and got converted to a Black Powder or Honours of War project.  This unit started as two groups of militia for supports, but has now been beefed up to count as a small unit of 20 in BP or HoW terms compared to my 24 man regular sized units.

My biggest challenge in doing the extra men was matching the blue, which is pretty vibrant on the original figures.  I found the right match (Grumbacher Ultramarine) and in my defence it's not too far off some illustrations I've seen, mostly it's the blue pants and waistcoat that add to uber blau effect.  Actually the uniform has a firm revolutionary or early Empire French Leger feel to it.  Of course having matched the blue, I was a bit off on the basing colours but not too far that I'm bother to rebase them.

The new stands are in the middle and the ground work is just bit off the colour of the older figures.

I've gotten some favourable comments on basing before so I'd thought I'd share my recipe, which is as follows.

• Glue your figs to your base of choice (I've used the plastic bases that come in Perry kits because I'm cheap)
• Take a good sized glob of Liquitex raw Sienna and add a heading spoonful of Liquitex Matte Gel medium
• Mix these together with a shake of fine ballast
• Apply the resulting gloppity glop (Lorax reference) on the topside of the bases, attempting to smooth the transition from flat base to raised figure base and leaving lots of lumps about.  Paint the edges of the bases in raw sienna without the ballast etc to give smooth edges.
• Once dry (this takes a while) give it a heavy wash with Liquitex raw umber (I worked this out while working on Italian Wars and figured I'd use colours based on actual Italian mud).
• Go back and touch up boots, hoofs and gaiter as required, although mud splatters look good too.
• Add stones to flavour - I use a mix of sand, fine ballast and chunky kitty litter.  Add tufts (I use army painter because I'm cheap and lazy and they can be had locally) to cover up the worst flaws.

I've really enjoyed this year's challenge - great work everyone.  Can't wait til next year.

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Great work Peter! It's been a pleasure watching you develop this project over the past few years and I look forward to when we game it next.

- Curt