Friday, January 24, 2014

1st Virginia Continental Infantry Regiment


It's been quite some time since I last painted up anything for my AWI collection, but I wanted to build it up some more again. This is for three reasons with the first being I acquired a large British army through a local forum and need something to fight it and second I really like the game Maurice and want to game this period in it and lastly I just really like the period and miss it!

This is the 1st Virginia Continental Infantry Regiment in their early uniform of hunting shirts, before later adopting the typical Continental infantry coat of blue with red turn backs. I choose the hunting shirt as it's simply my favourite uniform from all sides during the war, but as simple as it may look it's time consuming to paint all the frills, but worth it. A distinctive trait of the 1st Virginia hunting shirts was their use of a red trim on their collars and cuffs of their hunting shirts which I think gives it a little extra nice factor. Since I'm a firm believer that it was rare for an American unit to be perfectly uniformed during the war I mixed up the colours a little on the uniforms using some different shades of white and mixing in some browns and changed the sacks and pants to give my impression of  what the unit possibly looked like. That said, I didn't want to go overboard with the mixing so as to retain their look of a regular infantry regiment and not militia unit. I did this by dominating the unit in an light grey off white hunting shirt and left some other details the same.

The first Virginia was raised on July 17, 1775 in Williamsburg,Virginia as a state Militia before entering service in the Continental army. The regiment fought well in most of the battles in the North including Great Ridge, New York, Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, Stony Point, before moving south only to unfortunately have to surrender at Charleston after a siege. Another interesting fact was that George Washington himself as a younger officier commanded the earlier incarnation of this regiment in the French and Indian Wars.

I'll be doing some northern campaigns, but generally speaking I prefer the southern campaigns so I'll of course be using these as regular Continentals when fighting in the south as the regiment itself took little part other then a few left over companies not captured that were grouped with other newly formed units.

The figures themselves are Perry miniatures and my preferred choice for the period in spite of the clean up required on a few of the figures and the difficulty in painting some of the fine lines. That said, the Perry AWI range is both beautifully sculpted and extensive in scope and well worth the effort. The flag is from the very nice Flag of Wars range of AWI flags.

Thanks for viewing!:-)
Miniature Company- Perry Miniatures



Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Travelling the waterfalls


A bit of a return to my French and Indian wars as I want to get a game in of Muskets and  Tomahawks this year and I love the period.:-)

The scene is of a small returning war party finished with raiding for the day and heading home to their Wig Wam's. The figures are from the brilliant Redoubt French and Indian War line which I really like! These figures unlike some others I've had from Redoubt were pretty easy to clean up and painting them was quite fun. I think Redoubt perfectly captures the look of the Indians of this period and just gives them a dangerous and free feel to them. All their canoe packs are great and are a must do in my opinion.

Thanks for viewing!:-)
Miniature Company- Redoubt Miniatures


Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Old West Quantrill Outlaw


My first post of 2014. I hope you had a good New Years and wish everyone a lot of luck on the coming Year. I've also updated the project status in header for 2014 listing my new approach.

The figure above is both my villain entry and admission figure for Curt's Analogue Hobbies painting challenge here . Each person is required to paint a figure as kind of an entry fee and this time Curt choose Sam Peckinpah related films as the subject matter for the entry figures. I decided to do a western figure, because Mr. Pechinpah did a famous western film called The Wild Bunch.

Also each Fortnight is a Bonus theme and the upcoming one is villains which I'm currently not doing anything that would fit that, but then a rare thing happened and a light bulb went off in my head and I realized that I could use the entry figure for this as well as he is an outlaw so fits the requirement for villain. So I decided to move him up in the production line so I could meet the deadline.

I painted the figure up to look like an ex-confederate Quantrill raider(considered villains by many)   that has now taken up the occupation of an outlaw murdering and robbing for personal profit.
The figure is from Wargames Foundry was a joy to paint up with nice wide smooth surfaces to paint.

Thanks for viewing!
Miniature Company- Wargames Foundry