Friday 8 August 2008

Paris! Paris!

Hoi There!

There will be no up-dates for some days since I will be leaving for Paris for a week. Amongst other things I am going to visit the Musée de l'Armée. I have actually been there before some 10 or maybe even 12 years ago and did not quite appreciate what I was seeing back then being still a young lad only at the beginning of my military history studies. Same is true for Napoleon's grave...I will visit again now and with a lot more purpose and cherish the moment. I hope to make loads of pictures and some will inevitably find their way here.

Well till then,

Au revoir Sandére!

Tuesday 5 August 2008

You will remember this as the day...

...that Captain James Swallow would not led himself be captured on camera!

Okay so I tried indoors with a gazillion different camera options to photograph the little bugger, but would he let himself be captured on film? Noooohooooo! I had to go outside and even then the picture turned out to be not good enough to do this paintjob proper justice. Well judge for yourselves ye lubbers and freshwater sailors! Avast and all that...

Two pictures of his front-view, taken outdoors:



Different views of the Pirate Scoundrel, taken indoors:



hope you like him as much as I do!

Oops I did it again!

Yes yes, I succumbed to the awful modellers disease of starting new projects before finishing the current ones yet again! While browsing the net for colour reference for Pirate-clothing I stumbled along the excellent Front Rank http://www.frontrank.com/index.asp and Crusader http://www.crusaderminiatures.com/index.php websites who have some really gorgeous figures in their assortment. Amongst them are ranges for the Seven Years War and I happen to have a large portion of Revell 7YW figures lying around. So I delved those up and started dividing them in two armies one Austrian (as all the infantry models are Austrians http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.asp?manu=REV&code=02574) and one British force of 6 (20 man) regiments each, amounting to two brigades. For the Brits I will need to do a lot of head swaps so I'll start with the Austrians for now. As it happens I had one box of aforementioned figures painted when a kid and these are now being re-done to create some Austrian Grenadiers and Line. After creating the regiments, taking care to match the right poses, I found that I wanted to do some test figures to see what colours I want to make my regiments in. The figures featured here are the first of them.



Because they were already painted (two times) with enamel paints a lot of the detail was gone or filled with paint, which now leaves these figures rough on the edges so to speak. Nevertheless I am quite content with how they worked out.

When re-painting old figures I tend to give them a better paintjob of their original one. For instance: I have two sets of painted Revell Chasseurs a Cheval de la Garde http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.asp?manu=REV&code=02576 which will remain Garde chasseurs, I also have some other unpainted sets of the same, for which I have different plans: one set will be turned into Dutch hussars of the Waterloo period and one or two others will be turned into elite companies of French line hussar regiments in Spain.

Same is true for Revell´s Life Guards http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.asp?manu=REV&code=02578 at the moment I have one set painted as Royals and the others as the Blues, this makes for a very silly mix of poses. I will redress this by painting all the resting poses as the Blues and the charging poses as the Royals. In time...when I’ll find time.

Oh on the work-in-process front: I actually finished Captain James Swallow today and took pictures, but they were not good enough for publishing so I will take new ones. I think he turned out lovely.

Cheers Sander