With nothing left to paint....

A red cross parcel is winging its way to nz but since I am completely out of figures I present a vignette of workers at a field forge - completed in 30 min while sitting cross legged at our coffee table in the lounge.

Finished product

After a relaxing weekend finishing off the final bits these babies are now safely tucked away in their box in the laundry. Now I am thrashing around looking for a new winter project. There are a few British  infantry to paint but in all honesty I am pretty much out of figures to work on. I am going to have to raid Hannents for a restock.

After the weekend

Austrians in the weekend!

I have been painting til I lost feeling in my legs - and loving it.

I got up this morning, climbed over sleeping children in the lounge (josie had come back  with a school friend at about 1 in the morning after a karaoke party) and got straight to work on a couple of battalions of Austrians. I must have painted for at least two hours before 2nd child asked me to make pancakes. I managed to get another couple of hours in before dropping 1st girl off for a sleepover tonight and then going down to record my wife's concert.  Now I have lit the fire and am settling into a restful evening of painting. Winter seems to be slowly making its presence felt (about 6 weeks late ) but I am happy in my little house at the bottom of the planet.

An Unexpected Project.

For the last 25 year or so a bunch of about 200 Austrian figures have languished in a plastic bag or have been lying based(in varying stages of repair) in boxes in the garage. On Friday, on a bit of a whim, I took them out and decided to paint them and rebase them as to the standard of my current figures.  Austrians had historically larger battalions than those of the French but had the same number of companies (six). This would have meant that I would have had to have recut bases to signify a larger physical size of the battalion. I didn’t want to be bothered by all that so I decided to stick four figures to a base rather than the normal three. This meant that an 18 figure battalion now becomes a 24 figure battalion – with the same dimensions.  Visually, I think this improves the look of the battalion and the Austrians do take on the look of a battalion mass. All of the figures are Esci or Italeri and have the middle period Raupenhelm which in my humble opinion really define the Napoleonic conflict for the Austrians. I am no fan of the shako but of course will paint a post 1809 army later to take on the French at Leipzig.  I have 9 “German” battalions and one grenadier at the moment in the process of being painted and am having a ton of fun. Austrian line make for really pleasing figures inspite of the white uniforms.  Photos to come J