Thursday, December 20, 2012

The December dispatch

December has been a pretty busy month, what with one thing and another--bad for blogging, but not for painting. Last night, I put the finishing touches on the last of my squadron of Wachovian cuirassiers, which I have been working on diligently all month. Heavy cavalry has been a long-standing weakness of Wachovia, so hopefully these guys will help to close that gap.

The whole squadron

From the other side


A couple of views of the officer

I did manage to find time for one other little NQSYW project: updating the regimental flag for the 1st infantry regiment. Having recently settled on a Wachovian national flag, I decided that the regimental flags should share a unified motif, and besides which, the old one was not quite up to my current standards. (No pun intended there.) I stopped short of repainting the figure himself, though he's seen better days as well.


The new flag is stage one (or perhaps two or three, depending on how one is counting them) of my rather grandiose plans for Wachovian military expansion, the extent of which is hinted at by this sketch from a couple of weeks back:

As of now, only three of those seven units have any basis in reality, and the Cuirassier Guards are still too few in number to warrant a flag. However, this does provide a potential roadmap for a couple of years' worth of work, should I choose to follow through on it. The addition of at least a second infantry regiment has been part of my ambition for a while now, and having done one squadron of cuirassiers, I intend to expand them to a full regiment. Beyond that, we shall see. If I were to maintain my current painting speed of about one figure every two days, then this would keep me going until mid-2014...

(My other big project this December has been Christmas cookie-baking, which has also proceeded apace:


The color similarity between the Empire Biscuits and the cuirassiers' uniforms is totally a coincidence, I swear!)

4 comments:

  1. They look great! (note how I didn't say scrumptious?) I never cared for the pose when browsing the catalog but I have to admit the unit looks good once painted.

    Now if they just had a nice glossy finish....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, I was a little skeptical at first, but they grew on me as I went along. In retrospect, I'm glad I went with the historical black for the breastplate instead of some sort of metallic color; I think it would look too busy with the belts otherwise.

      And I'm not quite ready to cross over to the glossy side yet, though if I were forced to do everything over from scratch I might consider it...

      Delete
  2. These look very elegant, Norman. Very nice, simple but stand-out colour schemes. I was wondering about the roundels on the flags. Could they accommodate a ruler's cypher, say, or a unit number? Just a thought: they could as well be roundels or.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks! Heraldicly, they *are* roundels or, or bezants. I suppose they could theoretically have lettering or whatnot--the old regimental flag had just a single large roundel in the upper-left quadrant, with a Roman numeral I in the center--but I was intending for the effect to be similar to some French examples, at least for the infantry: http://flyingpigment.com/french/frenchinf2.jpg

      Delete