28mm Austrians March - Depot Battallion

January would seem to be the month for raising your units, load the magazines, and make grandiose plans for the coming campaigns.

I have, so far, managed to assembly my entire collection of Austrian plastic that had been stockpiled. The lions share of these are victrix models which have different poses (and 2 arms!) so are much more time consuming to assemble than the marching Perry's.

In rough numbers I have a bit over 150 Austrians. Some miscellaneous stuff was also assembled to try and clean the computer desk up a bit. I intended to prime them up for the 'look I've done work!' shot, but the local game store is out of stock of the 'wraithbone' coloured priming I'm hoping to use. The plan, roughly, will be:  to prime off white, basecoat some flesh and other colours that benefit from a wash, ink it, and highlight everything necessary.

I converted some metal colonel figs with helmets to bicornes to make some higher level (field) officers. I think the heads might be sitting a bit proud on the cut neck, but I don't relish drilling out the neck so I'll live with it. 

Napoleonic French Young Guard & Guard (Empress) Dragoons

I realized as I was working on my New Year post that I don't have any (*ANY!*) pictures of stuff I painted this year. Mostly I haven't painted much, the stuff I have done was mostly prep, or partially complete. I did finish a whack of napoleonics for Enfilade back in May that I never documented. I hope that means I finished other stuff but didn't take photos, but who knows...




These figures were part of a mystery lot I got off TMP that were aggressively priced. Conveniently they ended up being a mix of elite and regular line. The elites I peeled off to use as young guard, mixing in the last 20 figs from a victrix box of guard (the previous 40 parceled out to old and middle guard).






I only needed 4 units (~10 men each) for the convention game, but I decided to make 6 bases to future proof my young guard for other campaigns.








I had most of the other figs I needed but was short some empress dragoons (guard dragoons). I already had a box of perry french dragoons but the saddle furniture and braid is different so I attempted a conversion with green stuff putty and some suture material for the braid.



 I wasn't super pleased with the result...looking closely you can see that the 'scales' at the front of the saddle furniture and a bit too variable, and that the 'lay' of the braid loops is a bit too flouncy. I was under the gun and it meets the 2 foot table top standard so good enough.
It also helped with the excess number of dragoons I'd probably otherwise have.