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Author Topic: Pax's Waterloo  (Read 4489 times)

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Offline Lachdonin

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #40 on: January 7, 2024, 03:55:43 PM »
They look ready to invade Russia.
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Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #41 on: January 8, 2024, 03:03:13 PM »
They look ready to invade Russia.

If that's your way of saying they look ready to go to hell then I applaud your creativity! ;D

On a more serious note, yes they do. These models would be accurate for Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia so there's nothing keeping me from using them for that too if I wanted to. Although the greatcoats might give the impression of the men being specifically geared up for winter campaigning, the greatcoats could be worn year-round whenever circumstances called for it, as they were at Waterloo. They were just as useful for keeping out rain and mud as snow.

Offline Lachdonin

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #42 on: January 8, 2024, 04:18:39 PM »
Although the greatcoats might give the impression of the men being specifically geared up for winter campaigning, the greatcoats could be worn year-round whenever circumstances called for it

Oh absolutely. Though the modern pop-culture perception of military dress for the period definitely favours the representation of them being specifically for winter or cold weather.
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Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #43 on: February 7, 2024, 10:27:58 AM »
I made some progress this month although pictures have been sparse.
- Replaced the too-short flagstaffs on my British 33rd Regiment of Foot and basecoated the command group again.
- Made some modest painting progress on my French infantrymen.
- And... (Can you see it in the picture?)



... started assembling my chasseurs à cheval!

They are of course more properly known as horsey boys. Speaking of horseys, I completed a test model.



Stage 1. Basecoat Vallejo grey primer



Stage 2.
Vallejo 72.044 Dark Fleshtone: skin
Vallejo 70.850 Medium Olive: bedroll
Vallejo 70.862 Black Grey: hooves, tail and mane
Vallejo 72.034 Bone White: sheepskin



Stage 3.
Army Painter Quickshade Strong Tone: skin
Vallejo 72.090 Black Green Ink: bedroll
Vallejo 72.094 Black Ink: tail and mane
Army Painter Quickshade Soft Tone: sheepskin



Stage 4.
Tail and mane: Highlighted with Vallejo 70.862 Black Grey and Vallejo 70.836 London Grey
White details: Vallejo 70.820 Off-White
Metals: Vallejo 70.865 Oily Steel
Saddlecloth: Vallejo 72.005 Moon Yellow and Army Painter Quickshade Soft Tone
Sheepskin: Drybrushed Vallejo 72.034 Bone White and Vallejo 70.820 Off-White
Leatherwork: Vallejo 72.051 Black, highlighted with Vallejo 70.862 Black Grey and Vallejo 70.836 London Grey
Muzzle: Vallejo 70.862 Black Grey highlighted with Vallejo 70.836 London Grey

I'm documenting this as much for my own future references as for anyone else who wants to try to replicate the result.

The Army Painter quickshades appear to work best on lighter base colours like the sheepskin and saddlecloth than on darker colours like the horse's skin. The Soft Tone made the sheepskin too yellow for my tastes, which the drybrushing could not fully remedy. For the next one I'll try drybrushing bone white over khaki. For the next horse I'll try the Strong Tone over a lighter brown.

The regimental number is a pain to paint onto the end of the bedroll because the area's both small and deeply recessed. Glad the one that turned out best was on the lefthand side! I'm not entirely satisfied with the green. It looks just a touch too drab to my eyes. I'll see about getting a different colour from the store this week.

Sometimes I just get a burst of enthusiasm for a particular project. I find it's best to make the most of it while it lasts. Last week there was a tiny voice in my head screaming at me to paint some horses, hence my dropping everything I was working on to change tack. Look out for some more horses soon!
« Last Edit: February 7, 2024, 10:30:30 AM by PaxImperator »

Offline Guildmage Aech

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #44 on: February 7, 2024, 11:47:53 AM »
Yeah, I also changing tack sometimes helps with the enthusiasm. Or the poor attention span I guess...

Horsey boys are pretty cool. I liked the Cavalry I had for my high elves back in the day... I just hated painting horses.

I take it these guys have pistols instead of lances by this era?
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Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #45 on: February 7, 2024, 12:35:54 PM »
I hear a lot of people hate painting horses. I rather enjoyed painting this one. A lot of big surfaces without too much detail makes for pretty quick results and associated dopamine rush. :D Beats painting infantry in my books. Not especially looking forward to the riders though.

The chasseurs à cheval fought with sabres and flintlock carbines and probably the odd pistol, as did most of the cavalry of the Napoleonic era. Lances were still about though and very effective too! Check out the Polish Light Cavalry Lancers of the French Imperial Guard for example. They inspired the creation of many a lancer regiment, both in the French army and in those of France's enemies. In the Napoleonic era gunpowder weapons were already formidable, but not yet to the extent that lances, sabres and bayonets were approaching obsolescence. Infantry were capable of repelling a cavalry charge, but had to fix bayonets and form square to do so. Half a century later, by the time of the American Civil War, gunpowder technology had advanced to the point where cavalry were mostly relegated to scouting and raiding duties because they'd just be mown down by infantry in line formation. The infantry square was obsolete by that point. Shock action was still possible, but not as frequently as before. The fine balance between infantry, cavalry and artillery is part of the draw of Napoleonics. With a bit of luck and skill, the horsey boys can still cover themselves in glory!

Offline Lachdonin

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #46 on: February 11, 2024, 08:36:33 PM »
I'm also not a fan of painting horses. Adore cavalry, but painting horses? Never liked it. Though looking at that beauty makes me wonder how much of that hate was from GW's old horse sculpts...
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Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #47 on: February 18, 2024, 09:58:07 AM »
I'm also not a fan of painting horses. Adore cavalry, but painting horses? Never liked it. Though looking at that beauty makes me wonder how much of that hate was from GW's old horse sculpts...

Yes, the last horses I painted before these were from GW's plastic Empire pistoliers kit way back when. Those were on the chunkier side if I'm not mistaken. These look better proportioned to my eyes but I'm no horse connoisseur.

Anyway, progress! :D



From left to right, we have:

Horse 1: Vallejo 72.042 Parasite Brown, Vallejo 72.093 Skin Wash
Horse 2: Vallejo 72.042 Parasite Brown, Army Painter Strong Tone
Horse 3: Vallejo 72.045 Charred Brown, Army Painter Strong Tone
Horse 4: Vallejo 72.044 Dark Fleshtone, Army Painter Strong Tone (same horse as in my earlier post)

The second horse from the left was the second one I painted. I basecoated the sheepskin Vallejo 72.061 Khaki, then drybrushed Vallejo 72.034 Bone White and Vallejo 70.820 Off-White on top. That still looked too dark to me so on horse 1 and 3 I used Vallejo 72.034 Bone White as a basecoat and drybrushed Vallejo 70.820 Off-White over it. Happy with the result so will be using that for the rest of the regiment.

On horse 1, the Skin Wash wasn't a great succes because it dried patchy. Won't be using it on a big flat surface like that again. On horse 2 and 3, as before on horse 4, the Army Painter Strong Tone was a great success. I still managed to slightly screw it up on horse 2 by trying to manipulate it with my brush as it was drying, but I won't be making that mistake again.

Next up will be two chestnut horses and two bay ones, all using Vallejo 72.044 Dark Fleshtone as the base colour. Gotta have brown horses! After that, I'll have four horses left and feel inclined to experiment some more on those. I could use four different greys/browns, slap on some Strong Tone and see what happens. The regiment will look less, err.. regimented but that's the intention. Military units of the time valued not just strength, speed, agility etc. in their horses but also uniformity of coat colour. Chasseurs à cheval being pretty low in the pecking order, they were among the last cavalry units to take their pick before the remainder were consigned to the unglamorous position of draught horse. Combine that with France's 1815 horse shortage and it stands to reason this unit would have a lot of differently coloured horses.

Offline Myen'Tal

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #48 on: February 18, 2024, 03:16:11 PM »
Awesome work! I've always found miniatures based on animals to be intimidating lol, so much fur / skin to cover. You did a wonderful job on these!
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Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #49 on: February 25, 2024, 01:58:17 PM »
Cheers! Strangely I've found these easier to work on than infantry because I can go back and forth between the horses and the riders whenever I lose steam. Speaking of riders, I've built a torture device painting doohickey to hold my cavalrymen in place so I can more easily spray paint them. It's two separate wooden slats with screws at regular intervals. Worked a treat for spray painting but less so for brush painting. The models are just close enough together that I'm having trouble getting at them from all angles with a brush. Maybe I could pull half of them off...



The men like to imagine they're sitting on barstools in a pub. It's better for morale than dwelling on the relentless pull of gravity while straddling a screw...

The box art in the background shows you what they should eventually look like, more or less. I've run into a few interesting problems with these models' uniforms. The biggest one is that all my research suggests they did not actually have man bags sabretaches at Waterloo. (Those are the rectangular bags suspended alongside the sabre scabards.) It seems like a rather glaring error on what are marketed as Waterloo figures. Secondly, and slightly less annoyingly, are the elite company models with bearskin hats. Historically these had red epaulettes but there are no models for that in the box. I've decided not to model the elite company rather than break out the green stuff. Thirdly, there's the pompons. The heads with shako covers on are designed without pompons but shako covers were specially designed to cover the entire shako except the pompon (and the visor). I've rectified this by cutting thin slices off an old GW skeleton warrior's spear and gluing them onto the covered shakos to serve as pompons.

Speaking of pompons, you might notice my models have them in two shapes: orb and disk shaped. The reason is that a chasseur à cheval regiment's 1st-4th companies had orb-shaped pompons on their shakos and the 5th-8th companies had disk-shaped ones. I'm feeling pretty clever about getting that detail right.

If all of that sounded rather too anal retentive for your tastes, I can't blame you. Getting the details right is part of the fun for me but I can't fault anyone for just assembling the models and having fun with them. It's what I'm doing with the sabretaches, even though I'm still a bit bummed out by it.

All of this has made me pretty keen on trying out some Perry plastics. They seem to be sticklers for uniform details like these, so assembling some of their chasseurs à cheval should be a joy! They seem to sculpt more dynamic horses too, which would be nice bonus.

Next up: more horses and a chasseur test model!

Offline Myen'Tal

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #50 on: February 26, 2024, 01:59:54 PM »
lol, awesome way to sub-assembly! There's so many innovative ways out there!
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Offline Guildmage Aech

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #51 on: March 4, 2024, 10:04:06 AM »
Thats a lot of horsey boys. Hey, will there be artillery?

I assume more realistic than the somewhat cartoonish Empire Great Cannon?
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Offline PaxImperator

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #52 on: March 4, 2024, 10:56:20 AM »
Thats a lot of horsey boys. Hey, will there be artillery?

I assume more realistic than the somewhat cartoonish Empire Great Cannon?

I've got one Royal Artillery piece like this, but still in the box. There will certainly be more (linky), but I've sorta-kinda promised myself I wouldn't get any more models until I've painted most of my current ones. I'd better double down on that painting then.

Speaking of painting, I've been experimenting with my fancy new Army Painter washes.



Since I wouldn't dream of experimenting on any of my actually good-looking models, I've turned to some turn-of-the-milennium GW WHFB zombies I still had lying around. This first one looked a bit too saturated to me.

For the second one, I tried a mix of:
2 parts Army painter speedpaint medium
1 part Army Painter Dark Tone
1 part Army Painter Soft Tone



Who ever said you can't give your informed consent to being covered in brown goo when under the influence of a necromantic spell, right? This mix flowed better into the recesses but the tint seemed a bit too yellowish.

All of which enabled me to work up the courage to try the following mix on one of my French infantrymen:
2 parts Army Painter speedpaint medium
1 part Army Painter dark tone
1 part Army Painter mid brown



Although the wash did add some shading in a few spots where I wanted it, it also stained most of the miniature in a way I'm less happy with. The trousers especially look soiled now. I'll have to do some clean up to get rid of it again. I should probably try it out on a mini with just base colours over a white undercoat. My first chasseur à cheval fits that description but there's no way I'm risking him on an experiment like this. I'd hoped for an effect more like this. Perhaps I slopped on too much wash and didn't wick enough away from his trousers. will have to paint up a few more poor bloody infantry and try it out on them. The results that YouTuber achieved with his 'marine juice' are spectacular so I'm not ready to give up on this idea yet.

What do you think? Any experience with washes like this?

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Re: Pax's Waterloo
« Reply #53 on: March 9, 2024, 08:56:53 AM »
I think I preferred the cleaner trousers! It does really work well on the zombies but depends how mich grime you wanted to go for.

I only really use washes in small amounts, those transport ships got an all over basilicium grey but the goal was dingy grime so idk if its what you're looking for?
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