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!)

Merry Christmas to all!

Well, now that Christmas is here I can show off what I've been up to all month. Our family prides itself on its Christmas cookies, so a good part of December was spent on baking. Here's a tray with all the assorted varieties in their buttery, sugary glory...

I was actually doing a bit more baking last night on Christmas Eve, so while the blackberry tart was in the oven I inveigled William into playing a game of Hordes of the Things. The match-up was my Mongols against his undead, with him on defense. I guess the Khan got tired of these freeloaders not paying their tribute, so he sent a punitive expedition to convince the lich to pay up.

William is unconcerned.

Things were looking pretty bad at first. I lost a couple of Riders to some tactical mistakes and poor rolling, and one of William's Magicians managed to ensorcel my Hero. (Fortunately not my general...) Down 10-0, things were not looking good.

The expeditionary force rides off.

We start to encounter some setbacks.

Hmm. Not looking so good...

It was about time for a Christmas miracle and lo! one appeared. One of my yakatheriums plunged through a gap in William's lines, evaded his archers and crashed straight into his stronghold. With only one shot at victory before his Hordes closed in, I rolled a six and he rolled a one! 

Victory!

And by that point, the tart was done, and I could go to bed.

In the morning we got up, ate some French toast, and opened some presents. I didn't end up with too much in the miniatures line, though I expect a few dollars of my Christmas money will go towards a box of Zvezda's Golden Horde to add some heavy cavalry to the Mongols...

Anyway, I finally got a chance to present Dad with the results of my secret painting project: character figures of Alleyne Edricsson and Sir Nigel Loring from The White Company, a favorite of his. I'm sure they'll see some action with the rest of his 54mm Hundred Years' War project...

Both Accurate figures. Alleyne, on the left, has had a head swap.

And now it's just about time to head off to Christmas dinner...

Digging in

Work on the fortress is still proceeding, and Dad hopes to start playtesting this weekend. Hopefully we will have the gatehouse painted and assembled by then, as it has been the major sticking point. However, today I finally got around to putting paint on some of the battery emplacements we built last weekend.

These started with a base of luan, to which we attached some roughly rectangular strips of scrap foam. Then these were cut into a more sloped shape, as seen here.

I filled in the cracks with spackle, and Dad cut some slots in the front for the cannon barrels.

Here are the painted batteries laid out to dry. The paint was given some texture by mixing in sand; the next step will be to drybrush with a lighter shade to match our existing trench sections.

(And if anyone read the title and expected this to be about food, here's a picture of some blueberry corn muffins.)