By the way here is the latest group of La

 Grande Armee to get flocked. Come to think of it the whole army got pretty flocked in 1812! They are minus their cannon in this picture. That will be another evening of painting and mounting.

Italeri La Haye Sainte

On a bit of a brain explosion I picked up three kits of the Italeri Waterloo 200^th Anniversary La Haye Sainte. This was not really on my agenda but the impulse was just too great.  The local model shop said they would match the internet price so in I went with $220 . This was about $60 cheaper than the shop would have otherwise put the boxes on sale for.

Anyway – the upshot is that I now have a pretty fantastic MDF La Haye Sainte to put together. This is going to be a summer project I guess because I just don’t have the room to have a massive farm sitting in the lounge.  The family house up in Hampden has much more room so I guess it will live there. The question will be can I live with the set in my room whispering “Build me build me!” Here are the pics of the set minus the front of the main boz which simply had a Banner Waterloo 200th Anniversary above a Brown Bess.

Back of the "Big Box"

Side with a blurb of the battle with some pretty dodgy English

The complete sets on the Big Box

Barn- I am interested to see whether this reflects the real farm at the time or the later additions which were done about 20 years after the battle.

Stables -

I haven’t seen any reviews of this specific set on the internet so I think I might do a review as I build. This will be something new for me and I am infamously disorganised so this is more aspirational than a real promise.

Send in the Cavalry!

French Guard Chasseurs and British Guard Heavy Cavalry

Winter has crept into the the South Island and to celebrate the dark, cold evenings I picked up some Revell sets from a very nice gentleman in the North Island.  I am not so sure that these sets will be super useful to me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I already have a squadron of Guard Chasseurs to protect the Emperor so I'm not too sure what the other three (hopefully ) squadrons will do. There is one bluish squadron of Guard Chasseurs which looks awesome so I'm going to paint up one to look like those dudes at least.  The second reason lies with the subject matter of the second set. These figures are the Life Guards.  Unfortunately, these chaps are wearing the uniforms from Waterloo.  This doesn’t give them any scope outside of that battle.  They do however look bitchinly awesome. So over the course of the next month I will be working on four squadrons -all the time checking the internet for the arrival of the Hat new releases of British cavalry. Hopefully these chaps will be my monster summer project!

The outskirts of Johnsdorf!

Every imaginary wargames table needs a town or two. Here then are the outskirts of the famous Johnsdorf - held at the moment by a lonely battalion of Nassauers in column.

Quietly Working Away

Over the past month I have chipped away on my Saxon Lieb Garde and French Curassiers. This has kept me painting quite happily as autumn slowly makes its presence felt at the bottom of the South Island. Between the Saxon and the French,  I pulled out a broken old Airfix cottage kit and started resurrecting it over the Easter period. Still a long way to go on this baby but it will go some way to dealing with my dearth of buildings on my imaginary wargames table.

Easter Cuirassiers

I recently picked up two boxes each of Saxon and French curassieres from Zvezda.  These are fantastic kits and for the first time I am making an effort to paint the horses as well as I can with my meagre skills rather than just painting them generic brown. This has been a lot of fun and I think the results will make much better eye candy on my imaginary wargames table.