Crimean British Re-Basing Begins
/Those who follow this blog will know that I have relatively recently re-based my 19th Century Austrians, Prussians, Russians and French in order to use Neil Thomas’ rules for the period.
The last of my Crimean armies to re-base was therefore the British…but this one would be slightly more complicated than the others.
The last set of rules that I used had the British as so elite that you didn’t really need many of them, so I only had a few infantry units, and cavalry units that were smaller than those of other nations. That meant that although I could easily re-base one unit of line infantry and one unit of Guards, I was a bit stuffed after that!
I had three units of cavalry that were ten figurers strong and I need them all to be twelve figures strong. Worse, I hadn’t actually painted these myself, so would have to match someone else’s painting style.
This was doubly interesting as I would also need to revert to my old style of painting as well: single colours over a black undercoat rather than the Contrast Paints system I use now. In fact, this was two steps back, as immediately before Contrast Paints I was using a base colour, wash plus shading over an undercoat!
As you’ll see from the following two units, the tactic I decided to adopt was to add two figures to the command stand. Here are the light and heavy dragoons. Can you tell which are the two extras?
Okay, so they are a little bit obvious in “catalogue” style pics like the above, but on the tabletop they just look like an exaggerated command stand, so I’m happy.
I also had to re-base the lancers in the same way, but these actually worked out better than the above, as I was able to use figures that almost exactly mimicked the ones I had. This time I really am asking if you can spot the two newbies!
Well perhaps still fairly obvious but, again, doesn’t show up at tabletop distances.
That left me needing to paint up half an infantry unit to match the half that I already had painted. By this time I’d also taken the trouble to work out that I had used Rank & File Miniatures (available through Timecast) and that it was worth buying a whole packet of infantry as the substitution would only leave me eight spare - it had seemed a bit much to buy three packets of cavalry to use just six figures!
The figures arrived very speedily, so kudos to Timecast for that, and I set about painting them. I think I’m a bit out of practice with this style of painting, as my finished versions didn’t look as good as the ones I already had. See what you think:
I suppose they are not too bad and, at wargames distance, they don’t appear that mixed: they just look like a slightly scruffy unit of line infantry…hardly surprising considering the conditions in the Crimea.
So that’s about half the army done now. One more cavalry unit to go (the 11th Hussars), the artillery, and I’ve bought a couple of extra infantry units so that I end up with six in all. Looks like I’m going to get a bit more practice at the obsolete style of painting after all!
