Ages ago, way before the first lockdown I decided I needed some dismounted light dragoons for my Anglo / Portuguese Peninsular army. Although the two main rulesets my army are used with (Black Powder and Shako II) don't make use of dismounted cavalry for the Napoleonic period, in one of my game scenerios we added in a house rule to allow french dragoons to dismount and act as skirmishers. We took advantage of other BP supplements' info and adapted.
As this scenerio has a British Light Dragoon picket I thought if I could find miniatures, why not. As it happened the Perry twins released some just around this time and so I purchased two packs of six from them. Brigade Games in the USA also released some dismounted British light dragoons as well, sculpted by Paul Hicks, their range included a horse holder set which I also purchased.
These were all duly based and primed ready for painting, the photo date stamp said June 2020.
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| Primed and ready, June 2020. |
Base layer painting started a few day later.
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| Painting starts |
This continued at a steady, if not slow pace until sometime around late August when my hobby mojo got up and left the building. No idea why, just developed a meh attitude to getting stuff out to paint of an evening after work. Whether this was just a symptom of the general meh that I'm sure a lot of people had last year, and may still be having, or just a shift in interest caused by no physical gaming occuring as the second lockdown started, I don't know.
Finally this February I had to go away for a week long training course for work and the prospect of every evening sat in a hotel room resulted in me getting these figures out again to take with me, along with a few painting supplies. To my surprise they were a lot nearer to completion than I remembered.
Returning after this week away they only needed final touchups and the basing finishing before varnishing. Another small delay while I ordered a base for the horse holders and then they were ready for varnishing. This finally happened two days ago as I wanted to try using my airbrush for this now I had a wider nozzel and needle.
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| Ready for varnishing. |
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| Pre varnish. |
After appling the matt varnish I painted in the horses eyes with gloss black and then re-varnished the horses' coats with a satin varnish, as the flat matt made them look lifeless.
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| Horse holders, post matt varnish, pre satin coat. |
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Skirmishing.
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| Full unit, 14th Light Dragoons. |
I have painted these with orange facings to represent the 14th Light Dragoons, who I also have as a mounted unit.
So after almost nine months they are finally finished, the longest it has taken me to complete anything (once started). Paint colours used can be found in the blog sidebar in the "My Resorces/ Downloads" section.
The next project, 18mm ACW Union cavalry was primed and basecoating started this weekend too. Hopefully these won't take as long and we can get back to real gaimg soon.
Take care,
Tony.
