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
