Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Tuesday 2 October 2018

Conversions and Paint Jobs - French Heavy Cavalry Trumpeters

I've been happily fiddling away at filling the "Command" gaps in my unplanned Reserve Cavalry Division. Yesterday it was trumpeters - I still have one trumpeter to finish off, then I move on to officers and eagle bearers. I've decided (or have been convinced by shortage of troopers) that my French cuirassiers will break with house tradition and will carry (1804-pattern) standards in action.

I'll get to that - any excuse for a play with Paintshop Pro to knock up some flags. In the meantime, just because I have nothing else to post about, here are some trumpeters. Nothing great, to be sure, but any kind of conversion or paint-conversion work is almost always satisfying work.

Each trumpeter is sentenced to spend his operational life based with a trooper he never
met before. The troopers are all
PMD, with the compulsory "eyes-right" pose. The trumpeter
on the left (8th regt) is
Art Miniaturen, kindly supplied by the Old Metal Detector - strictly this
is from an OOP dragoon command set, but perfectly suitable; the one in the middle (3rd regt) is
an old (and not very ambitious) conversion by a previous owner, based on the trooper next to
him - I've revised the paint job extensively, and left him with his carbine; the one on the right
(7th regt) is the official
PMD-issue trumpeter (officially a dragoon, but intended to serve in
the cuirassiers as well), and I've mounted him on a 20mm
Garrison horse - partly for variety,
but also because it's a far better horse.


The uniforms are sort of 1809, and the regiments are selected so that the facings will also be suitable for 1813-14.

22 comments:

  1. Love the yellow chaps! They really stand out.

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    1. Thanks Ray. The Austrian rifle-armed sharpshooters really love them too!

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    2. Canaries in a coal mine, you might say

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    3. That's right - "Oh look, someone's shot the trumpeter again - the enemy must be somewhere around...". Must have been a risky job. Martinien didn't do tables of Trumpeters & Drummers Killed & Wounded of the First Empire" as far as I know - would have been interesting.

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  2. Very smart Tony, I can just see them throwing themselves against some British squares!

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    1. They could play them a tune after they were captured. Requests? Give Me Night or Give Me Blücher? Ridge Over Troubled Water? Lazy Sunday Afternoon? Suggestions welcome...!

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  3. Very nice indeed Tony, really strong vibrant colours.

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    1. Thanks Lee - I used about 4 coats of Vallejo yellow - I really don't like yellow paint. My old system was to start off with a coat of white, and put the yellow on that. Of course I didn't do that this time, because I was using Vallejo. Ha!

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  4. Replies
    1. Thanks Phil - there is a nice range of variations for cuirassier trumpeters - I did some reading of Bucquoy and similar, plus the eye-witness plates produced in Hamburg. The cuirassiers also seem to have been especially strong-minded about hanging on to outdated or unofficial variants. I was surprised by the blue lace on the jackets, but it seems to have been widely used.

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  5. Lovely job. I'm getting another attack of 28mm envy.

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    1. Thank you very much, but please go and wash your mouth out (hypocras will do) - these are 20mm, and don't you forget it!

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    2. Oh...if they're that small...no wonder I like them!

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    3. Ooh look...my first blogging faux pas!

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    4. May all your faux pas be little ones. I'm a bit envious of 28mm collectors myself - if I were starting now I guess 28mm would be the thing to have (lovely, but too big and expensive for me, I think). It was after my time that Frank Hinchliffe lost his measuring scales. All good stuff. The Meeji-Deeki Effect?

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    5. True 20mm collectors would object to my PMD soldiers being classed as 20's - these are old-fashioned "true 25mm", I guess - what a very silly hobby this is sometimes - I wonder if HO model railway collectors have to use the same make of locomotives to get them to fit on the tracks?

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  6. It must have been very difficult to pkay a trumpet call whilst on a fast moving horse. Looks like a good chance of a split lip"

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    1. Good point. Tricky. The trumpeter could have trotted gently in the rear, which wouldn't work. Or he could have carried a cinema organ, which would sound like the ice hockey - or the slow-motion charge from "Waterloo", I guess.

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    2. Technical update - I understand that the trick was to play the trumpet from the side of the mouth. Aha. Still sounds risky to me.

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  7. I have always liked the bold reversed colors uniforms of the Cuirassier trumpeters (please, none of that horrid Imperial Livery crap!). These will add some nice color contrasts to your regiments!

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    1. All the colour I can get helps. Another advantage of the earlier colour system is I cannot, for the life of me, make a convincing job of Imperial Livery - I have to admit to a couple of previous incidents of overpainting with reversed colours when I've given up in despair!

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    2. I treat Imperial Livery with much the same enthusiasm that the troops did - wear the stuff out as quickly as possible, so you can replace it with reversed colors! :-)

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