Sieges: More progress - the dirty end of the equipment!

 This is definitely going to be a post of rather specialist appeal, but if you like this sort of thing then you may like it.

Here is my enhanced collection of gabions, now painted, and ready for - well, whatever it is that I might need gabions to do...

 

Some of these are bit oversize, but that's OK, and they will be harder to lose in the field. The small objects on the right look rather like Minifigs 5mm troop blocks, but are officially wooden chevaux de frises [I mention these with some trepidation, since last time 5mm troop blocks came up here some idiot had a conniption, for reasons which still mystify me]. Now that I have some chevaux de frises, I need to think how they might feature in the game - Chris Duffy doesn't mention them in the Sandhurst rules...

Next job is to start experimenting with designs for flat glacis plates - a future post may feature some of this.

Guest Spot: The Pride and the Passion

 Something really special this week. Rob very kindly sent me photos of his newly-finished project, based on the Stanley Kramer movie released in 1957, and I'm really very excited about it, as I hope and expect that you also will be.

A lot of impressive conversion work in here - a small spoiler: Sophia Loren is carved from a Lamming WW2 figure! All will be revealed. Here is Rob's explanatory text about how he went about it.

So here’s the result of the photo-shoot, together with pictures showing the original Newline figures used for Cary & Frank and the Lamming next to Sophia, albeit I did a bit more work on her after that photo.  Work on Cary was minimal, just extending his hat and thinning down his limbs, and Frank just had his limbs slimmed down and repositioned plus a fuse wire rope and solder jacket over his shoulder.  Sophia was a bit of an epic.  Her legs were slimmed down and her arms removed and thinned and then reinserted in the drilled out short sleeves (the original arms are too long and the hands too big); the dress and hair were built up with solder.  As you will see from the final picture even the OOT Warhammer Great Cannon is decidedly under-sized for ‘The Gun’.

Terrific stuff Rob - thanks very much for sharing your photos. Inspirational!

WSS: A Little More Allied Horse

 Proper painting of fresh castings, this time - definitely all me own werk.

I'm using shorter sessions now, out of kindness to the old peepers, so this batch took a day or two longer than I planned, but I'm pleased with them. Nice and shiny, Old School toy soldiers.

These are a couple of regiments of cavalry from Hessen-Kassel, to support the new infantry brigade.

 

Leib zu Pferd

 

Spiegel

Hessen-Kassel is an interesting nation in this context. The Landgrave has not pitched in his army on the side of the Grand Alliance; well, not necessarily so. These two units were paid, equal shares, by the British and Dutch armies, so strictly speaking they appear as mercenaries.

More than welcome, however. As ever, the figures are mostly Les Higgins 1970s castings; the command figures are Irregular, which gives a decent scale match and a bit of welcome variety, though the horses are all Higgins.

The lads are now in the duty boxes, getting to know their colleagues.

WSS: After You with the Sticking Plasters

 A couple of years ago, while setting up a little photo-shoot with my British WSS army, I managed to break off an officer's sword blade. These are Les Higgins figures, and the bayonets and swords are famously fragile, so I did a patch-up job with superglue, and got my photos taken.

I have always known that I'll have to make a better job of the sword repair, but to tell the truth I rather lost track of which unit it was. They all looked reasonable, and there is always a small chance that a quick repair might last indefinitely...

Nah - I didn't really believe this, and this afternoon, while I was sorting out the troops for what will be the last battle in my current campaign. it was suddenly made clear to me which sword blade it was, as it fell off again! 

Righto - today was the day fate had lined up for the proper repair, before I managed to lose the detached blade (it has happened), so I drilled out the officer's hand, carved a little tang on the hilt-end of the blade, and superglued it in properly. Job done. I still have to touch up the varnish a bit, once the superglue is cured, but I'm pleased with the result. The boys are all ready for a fight tomorrow.

 

Grenadier stand of Scrope Howe's Regt, now repaired. The extra superglue is a bit obvious, gleaming on the officer's hand, but I'll sort that out later, once I am confident I am not going to wreck an expensive brush with superglue which hasn't cured yet!

The campaign is very close, but the last battle is tomorrow evening, and it's a 3-pointer, so the winner of this battle will definitely win the campaign. I shall write up some form of report (unless I lose, of course).

WSS: More Bavarian Cuirassiers Ready for Action

 I showed a glimpse of these chaps in the Refurb Box a week or so ago. I finished the painting a couple of nights back - they are now based and flagged, ready for duty

 

Costa

 

 

Wolframsdorf

 

These are ex-Eric Knowles figures, repainted and with new command. The officers and standard bearers are SHQ ECW castings, modded a little, the trumpeters are from the Irregular Marlburian range, the troopers and all the horses are by Les Higgins. They've been in the Refurb Queue since Nov 2019, though, since they were rather battered, they've been back down the queue a bit until recently.

I'm glad they are finished; this has been a fiddly refurb job, and on a few occasions I heartily wished I'd stripped them and started again, rather than trying to preserve their original (1970s) provenance. Happy with them now, anyway. They can go into the French OOB for my campaign, where they'll be balanced by the arrival of 2 new Hessian infantry battalions in the Allied line-up.

WSS: Back in the Toils of Refurb Work Again!

 ...and enjoying it enormously, to be honest!

And, of course, I am laughing at myself as yet again I make the amazing discovery that a simple refurb job expands beyond belief as you work on it. What started out as a 3-session touch-up job on some figures which were quite nicely painted (albeit 50-odd years ago) has grown before my eyes; after a week of evening sessions, I reckon I still have about 4 sessions to go to complete them.

Just freshen up the white paint, fix the chips, tidy up the horses, change facing colours, humanise the faces, varnish, rebase - fit new flags. Easy-peasy.

Yeah, right. I've gradually rejected almost all of the original work - it has become a re-paint, and as such is in many ways more laborious than a fresh-metal job from scratch. I have spent a lot of time working round existing paintwork that I subsequently replaced. All good fun, of course; in the time-honoured principle of the executioner's axe, these will still be Old Eric's original figures (Gawd bless 'em), though the laboratory would struggle to find any trace of Eric's 1970s paint.

So - one week in - here's a work-in-progress shot which is actually more satisfactory than it might look. I am now halfway through the black, which will be followed by white, blue officers' sashes, lots of leather straps and harness, gold, silver, a touch-up of the edges of the coat colour, then varnish. Maybe 3 more sessions, say 4, for traditions of Estimate Creep.

When they are based and ready I'll post a proper photo. These will be the Bavarian cuirassier units of Wolframsdorf and Costa. Figures are mostly Les Higgins, vintage 1970 or thereabouts, the officers and standard bearers are SHQ figures with some small tweaks, the trumpeters from Irregular's Malburian range; all the horses are Higgins. I did some work with Plastic Putty to add neckties, to try to update the ECW figures by half a century or so.

All good fun. I know all about diminishing returns, and how there is a very definite limit to how good a job I can do on these, but I also have this growing conviction that in a few years I will not remember how quickly I got them finished; the important criterion, in the end, is how much I like them. I'm working on it.

WSS: More Hessians - eventually!

 Two fresh battalions, ready for the duty boxes. As mentioned previously, these have been marooned on the painting bottletops for about a year, so they are as relieved as I am.

Hessen-Kassel. These gentlemen are the Leibregiment zu Fuß (red cuffs, at front) and the IR Prinz Wilhelm (blue cuffs, at rear). As usual, they are mostly Les Higgins/PMD castings from the 1970s, with a few Irregular friends to fill out the command roles.

I was reading about Hessen-Kassel this week. The first and most important thing to know about the history of the army of that state is that it was complicated. My own WSS armies started life when I acquired the relevant 20mm bit of Eric Knowles' collection, so I was off to a flying start with Bavarians and Austrians, and there were also some French. The other nations in Eric's collection had been in different scales, so I spent the next few years hunting down compatible figures to bulk up the French army and build a British one. When I reached the "Phase Two" stage, at which I planned to decide which was to be my fifth army, the Dutch were an obvious choice, but the prospect of another mass of grey infantry caused me to think again. I eventually plumped for Hessen-Kassel, as a nice colour contrast, and maybe some Hanoverians. My subsequent reading reveals that this has not necessarily been a major change of plan, since there were plenty of Hessians and Hanoverians in Dutch pay after 1702.

Hessen-Kassel was one of a number of nations at that time which hired out their regiments to other armies. For example, Prinz Wilhelm was the colonel of two regiments bearing his name, the first of which (which had yellow facings) was formed for the Venetian service. The second was the one which appeared at Blenheim, possibly in Dutch pay, possibly British. Anyway, as long as they were paid, that's the main thing.

This morning's heroic rescue came when I realised I had mounted one of the flags upside down (I've only done this once before), but, miraculously, the glue was still wet enough to allow me to slide it off and refit it. That is probably all my good fortune for the next month used up in one dose. I refuse to say which flag it was, to avoid everybody looking for traces of damage. [There isn't any].

Strolling Along Nicely

 Soldier painting is progressing quite well - I'm keeping the sessions down to a couple of hours, since my eyes get tired, but I'm happy to be getting back to it. I have a couple of units close to being finished, and that will be an important step psychologically, apart from anything else; if I have a problem with a painting job, or if it gets stuck, this has always discouraged me out of all proportion to the seriousness of the issue. Energy sapping! This week should help a lot, in a number of ways. 

 

 I've also had a chance to get back to testing my solo campaign rules for Corporal John, which are coming along very well.  

Last month I got as far as the first tabletop battle in a fictional campaign. this was the action at La Bienveillance that I featured in a post at the time. I'm pleased that the Jolly Broom Man has been able to provide some very useful help and support via Zoom. To restate an idea about which I have become convinced, I believe that it is impossible to test anything original on one's own. Even if it is a solo game, we will always read the rules as though they say what we meant them to say, so the testing is invalid right from the start.

The bold JBM appeared last night, complete with a very intimidating set of whiskers, and we advanced the campaign a little without too much effort, and with no real problems.

We managed to start a background siege running, for the first time. It didn't last very long. The French laid siege to the small town of Rijnsburg, sending the siege train and the divisions of Lützelburg (Bavarian) and Bassinet (French). Rijnsburg was selected, not least, because of the mediochre reputation of the Dutch commander, Colonel Wiegman, and the result was the quickest collapse we have seen yet in a test siege. The investment was only 3 weeks into the job when something bad happened to the garrison - Wiegman asked to surrender, unconditionally, and the remains of the garrison and poor Wiegman were sent off to the hulks. The French now hold Rijnsburg, and obtained 2 Campaign Points for very little effort. They will have the job of repairing about 30% damage to the fortress.

We also got to the initiation of the next field action, which will be a biggish set-piece in the open country outside the town of Waremme, in Wallonia. The French will be attacking, and the Order of Battle will be:

I have to send some choices of battlefield terrain to JBM, and we can have a crack at it when opportunity allows. I also have to remind myself where to position the Zoom cameras for the extended version of my table - it should be OK, since I have done it before [hands up if you are convinced].

Any Day Now

 Been a bit distracted lately - no complaints really, just things to be getting on with and the odd storm to add excitement. The storms are losing novelty value now - maybe that's a good sign; if they become interesting again, it will probably be because of damage, so I'll settle for boring. Boring is good.

 

Boring

 

I've done hardly any soldier painting over the last year - a couple of jobs touching up bought-in figures, other than that I have two boxes of not-quite finished WSS chaps that have been hanging around since the start of last year. That seems a sensible place to get started again; I can work up to the freshly-reorganised boxes of raw metal later. As a token of good faith, I have put my painting mugs in the dishwasher, and am about to wash out my wet-palette container. If I make a flask of tea, tidy up my brushes, shift the small electric radiator into the painting room and try to get the DAB radio working, it should be just about bedtime.

Ha! - caught myself. No, I'll sit down with a couple of unfinished infantry units this morning, have a good look at them and decide what needs to be done to get them ready for duty. I suspect the house base-green paint may have gone off again, and I'm not confident about the state of my current pot of gloss varnish, but I can get on with the job until I reach the last stages. 

Right.

I have been working recently on the development of a campaign system (designed to work for solitary gamers, such as myself) to accompany my WSS rules. This has been time usefully spent, I think. The testing is presently on hold, another thing I have to get back to. I had a New Year exchange of emails with my friend Dominic, and he was very interested to learn of my campaign ideas. He was enthusiastic, in fact.

He asked, how was I dealing with sieges in my campaigns? I said that I wasn't really addressing sieges at this stage, though I intended to come back to them later, and my current target was just to be able to generate miniatures battles. Wrong answer. Good Old Dominic sort of snorted (via email), and pointed out that a WSS campaign which ignores sieges is a poor show. He was correct, of course - I have known this all along.

Thus there has been a two-week blitz on developing a siege add-on. If you are alarmed at the potential quality risks of adding sieges to the system in two weeks, I must explain that the siege game-within-a-game is a close relative of something I developed 12 years ago, so there is an underlying thread of sanity in there. Looks OK, anyway - it's added to the testing programme.

WSS: Another Refurbished Unit - Lobkowicz Cuirassiers

 I've been doing some refurb work in odd spare evenings, encouraged by the cooler weather. I bought in some pre-owned cavalry, added a couple of command figures, and here we have the Austrian Lobkowicz Cuirassiers, ready for action.

This is my fifth Austrian Cuirassier unit, all refurbs, and all the previous four have blackened armour, but I rather liked the appearance of the existing paintwork on this new unit, so kept them in the natural steel. I'd be embarrassed to try to justify this distinction, primarily because I'd be making it up, but in my reading I was interested to learn that Imperial cuirassiers units from the region of Lothringen [Lorraine] deliberately kept their armour unblackened. Not really relevant here, but it shows that there are options.

This particular regiment was raised in Silesia in 1682 by Count Veterani, was taken over in 1695 by Zanthe von Merl (who was from Luxembourg), after Veterani was beheaded by the Turks; by the time of Blenheim the inhaber was Prince Lobkowicz, who was a Czech. The point is merely that it is almost impossible to say where this unit came from! In the Imperial army, they were officially designated KR 17.

Figures are 20mm Les Higgins, as ever, the trumpeter is an SHQ man (from their 30YW range) mounted on a Higgins horse. 

A Load of Old Bullocks

 I've done very little painting for some months now. Apart from painting sabots with a 3/4-inch brush, a lot of stuff has been on hold, mostly because I have been having trouble with blepharitis again. Nothing dramatic, just a mild inflammation of my eyes which causes them to tear up and is a nuisance when I'm trying to read - or paint toy soldiers, as it happens. 

I've been getting some treatment for the old mince-pies, which includes heating up a bag of plastic pellets in the microwave and applying some unpleasant ointment, and it does seem to be improving. So on Saturday I did a very simple touch-up-and-varnish job on some Spanish muleteers which came my way via eBay. It's a very small start, but it is a start!

The only reason this is worthy of a photo at all is that the carts here have been painted and waiting 12 years for their drivers - you know it's never wise to rush these things. I have a reasonable number of such carts already complete, not to mention a handsome string of mules, quite happy to serve either side in the Peninsular War logistics department, so it's another small step for a man (or something).

The carts are Minifigs, I think, the oxen are Minifigs and Jacklex, and the "new" old drivers are Hinton Hunt. 

 Time to get back to the WSS lead pile, I think.

WSS: The First of the Hessians

 Very pleased to report that the first two battalions of the army of Hessen-Kassel are now ready for duty. Very nice paint job, as ever, by Lee. The castings, as ever, are 20mm Les Higgins, with a sprinkling of Irregular.

Here you see the Regiments Erbprinz (front, red facings) and Stückradt (rear, orange facings).

WSS: A Gratuitous Group of Glossy Generals

 I've been picking away at some more generals, and am pleased with the results. Pretty run-of-the-mill 20mm chaps really, but the progress is welcome after a bit of a wait.

 

This is (or could be) Earl Cadogan, accompanied by his faithful companion, Jupiter, who is black entirely because I cribbed it from Aly's blog

 

 

Normally I'm not really in favour of British Generals wearing cuirasses over their uniform coats, but this fellow is obviously some form of flaky cavalry commander or similar, so I'll take him on; he even has a moustache, for goodness sake

 

 

The main French Command Stand; the grey coat on the Grand Fromage is taken from a photo of a painted sample on the Front Rank website. My research does sometimes use secondary sources, I admit it

 

Two gentlemen from Hesse-Kassel. The chap on the left has a very old-fashioned hat, but he's a Les Higgins sculpt that I like very much. The more characters in my army, the better. His colleague is an Irregular casting, and this is the first official sight of a new experiment, standing Irregular foot figures on little brass discs, to give a better match in height and general appearance with the Higgins lads

***** Late Edit *****

I meant to mention this, because it made me laugh, but I forgot, so here it is, as an afterthought.

It will be apparent that the photos above were taken with the help of my new light-box, which is still quite unfamiliar. I took lots of photos, kept the ones I liked best, cropped them, resized them and all that.

When I had everything ready for the post, I was nonplussed to see something very strange had happened to my selected picture of the Hessian officers - exactly what had happened was a mystery, but the picture was faulty. It was apparent that a small child with a pencil had scribbled on the photo - a strange, rambling scribble, but definitely a scribble. Since I had seen neither children nor pencils during my photo shoot I was once again thinking in terms of some weird conspiracy to gaslight me.

However, when I went back to the original version on my camera, the mark was still there. You couldn't see it until the photo was zoomed, but the scribble was there. It was also present in some other shots I had taken at the same time, and the penny dropped. My light-box is held together with velcro - yards of it - round all the edges; it folds flat for storage, and you assemble it like a play-tent. The velcro had obviously captured a long (man-made) fibre from the sleeve of my winter sweater, and it had attached itself to the figure stand. It was almost impossible to see with the naked eye, but, once I had cropped and enhanced the picture, there it was. 

 

Original version, with supernatural digital scribble... [Click on this for a clearer view]

Easily fixed - the light-box was still set up, I just turned the lights back on and took a couple more photos. Tip for the future: consider wearing a wet-suit during light-box sessions...

*********************

WSS: British Command Group - Eventually!

 It's taken me a while, but I've finally painted up some companion figures to complement the splendid British General that Aly Morrison painted for me last December. So, suitably varnished and based, here they are.

The riders are all Irregular figures. The Commander's horse is an OOP Morion 30YW casting, the other two horses are by Les Higgins. The Commander has been sitting on a temporary single stand since December (he did get a walk-on role in my Battle of Ober Eschenbach, however, in May), so that's another worthwhile tick in a box.

Thanks again to Aly, of course, and to Old John for the Morion horse. The trumpeter is straight from the pages of Osprey's "Marlborough's Army". Once again, I am reminded that I must set myself up with a proper light-box and take some better photos of these armies!

***** Late Edit *****

Further to comment from David (below), here are the existing Command stands with flags for the Bavarians and Austrians. Nothing very clever!

*********************

WSS: Some More Generals

 I've been working away at some more WSS general staff figures for a few days. I have a couple more examples of the new casting ready for duty:

 

Another French one...

 

 

...and a British one

I'm also working on a British C-in-C group, but for this I have to finish off Marlborough's trumpeter - straight from the pages of the Osprey book! I'm not happy with the current selections of gold paint I have available - this guy will be covered in fancy lace - so I need to experiment a little with mixing some more subtle shades. Sounds like a job for a Sunday.

The challenge of trying to take some half-decent photos of my gloss-varnished soldiers reminds me - yet again - that I am still intending to get myself an unpretentious lightbox of some sort. Must get on with that. 

Oh yes - horses...

I'm keen to avoid producing impossible colourings for horses. I used to have a little book which gave very useful guidelines for correct combinations - the book was intended for horse fans rather than toy soldier painters, and of course it reflected modern horses rather than historical ones. Whatever, the point is that it got chucked out with a load of magazines and junk a couple of years ago (I think), and I miss it. My next door neighbour, 400 yards away, is a riding school and livery stable, and the owner, Carol, is delighted to keep me right on horse facts.

I try to keep my miniature horses, painted in my plodding toy soldier style, to varieties I can manage. This time I attempted a palomino-style horse, just for a change [not least because I have a pot of Foundry paint called Palomino], as you will see. I rather like him, but my expert source tells me that palominos would be very rare in Europe in the early 1700s - their use was largely restricted to the personal stable of the Spanish royal family.

I don't care. This French general obviously is well-connected! I shall, of course, refer to his horse as Trigger.

WSS: Something New; Test Paint

 My WSS armies very largely use Les Higgins 20mm figures from the 1970s. That range provides a good choice of poses, but the one obvious shortfall as far as I am concerned is in the choice of general officers. In fact there is only one, so there is no choice at all; Higgins provided a very good officer, in tricorne and cuirass, carrying a baton. I've used a good many of these, painted up in all sorts of colours, to provide for my Austrian and Bavarian armies, but for the French and the British, whose generals rarely wore cuirasses over their coats, this pose doesn't really cut it.

Anyway, work has been proceeding on this, and I now have some new castings, which I've been itching to get some paint on. The challenge has been to provide a cuirass-free general who will sit nicely on a Les Higgins horse, and here is my first test paint effort.

This fellow is a rather conservatively-garbed French officer, as you will see, and I'm very pleased with him. My compliments to Frederico for his splendid sculpt. I'll prepare a few more of these in various uniforms, and this will provide a real step forward on the recruitment front. All sorts of parade photos will present themselves.

 Next up should be a British general...

WSS: French Infantry Complete (Phase One, anyway!)

 There you go - the heatwave has moved on, my attic room is once again habitable, and a parcel of newly painted soldiers has arrived safely from Lee, who has done his customary excellent job (thanks again Lee). Any minute now I'll be back working on my hobbies!

Three battalions, which I have now based up and fitted with flags, all ready for the Duty Box. Here we have 2 battalions of Béarn and 1 of Toulouse. The castings are, as ever, 20mm Les Higgins/PMD, though the mounted officers are Irregular, albeit sitting on Higgins horses to keep the scale tight. The flags are by David of Not By Appointment, which I have had professionally laser-printed by Malcolm at Lothian Printers, in Dunbar. 

 

This completes the French infantry for the official "first" (probably only) phase of my WSS project. I should probably do a new group photo, but I'm still waiting to get some general staff figures back from the caster (it can't be much longer, surely?).

 

Very dark, wet morning here, and my flash photo wasn't very successful; I've included a couple of photos from my official WSS Catalogue collection, to make up for it.

WSS: More French Horse

 Very pleased to have a couple of new cavalry units ready for action. Lee did a very nice job of painting these. Strictly speaking, this is a single, large unit, but the way my rules handle that is to field them as two separate units, brigaded together.

These chaps, then, represent 6 squadrons of the Gendarmérie de France. The flags are from Robert Hall, the castings are Les Higgins 20mm with some command figures from Irregular.

I thought Napoleon's Guard was pretty confusing, but I have more problems understanding Louis XIV's household regiments. These chaps, I believe, were part of the Royal Household but not part of the actual Guard. No, I don't really see that either, but it means that in my games they will get "Status = 4" rating, which is elite, so that's all we need to know.

WSS: Languedoc Finished

 Extra figures painted, flags (by David of Not By Appointment) added, bases magnetized, photo taken in garden.

 

Régiment de Langedoc - 20mm Les Higgins castings, though the mounted officer is an Irregular figure on a Higgins horse

This is the last of the French units I propose to build by refurbishing Eric's men. There are still some figures left in the boxes, which may get called into service later, but the rest of the French will be virgin castings.

I wish you to know that I got bitten by ants while taking the pictures. Very small ants, but nippy! It is necessary to suffer for one's art.

This and That, but Mostly the Other

 This week I was handed a dose of Real World which has effectively put a stop to much of what I had been hoping to do over the Summer. With luck, I expect to get through this, and in the short term I now have a chance to clear up some odds and ends which have been dragging on a bit while I was indisposed with the Plague.

Topic 1: Another French WSS unit nearing completion

Last night I finished what may be my last refurbishment job for my WSS project. I completed 14 figures for the 18-man Régiment de Languedoc - there are still another 4 figures to be painted from scratch, but that should be very straightforward, and the refurb work is done. This batch has been a bit arduous, to be honest. 

At the start of the French phase of my project, I identified a lot of pre-painted figures from Eric Knowles' collection which could be restored to fill the ranks in my new army. Some of these needed only very light re-touching, so I prioritised those, but as I worked my way through I got to some more battered and re-hashed units, and this last lot was really pretty marginal; I might have been better stripping and starting again, and I think my decision to persevere with restoring them was influenced by a wish to keep Eric's old soldiers on the march as far as possible. Eric might not have recognised some of them now, but I'm pleased with what's been achieved.

The effort required for this batch wasn't helped by a historic decision by someone (many years ago) to improve a nicely-painted regiment by the addition of sawdust, Russian toffee and henhouse-green paint to the bases. Well, in many cases, to the area below the soldiers' knees. Yuck. It's taken me about 2 weeks of soaking and scraping to get it off, but it is now gone.

Anyway, as of this morning, here are the 14 restored fellows, with the glue drying, waiting for a new mounted officer, two ensigns and a drummer to complete them. I'll post a smart photo once they are ready for action.

Topic 2: A Very Old Brush

I've maybe mentioned this brush before, but I was working yesterday with a brush which is certainly the oldest I have, I wonder how long these things last? When my dad died, 14 years ago, I helped my mother to clear out all his old art materials; he had been a keen watercolourist, but hadn't been near the hobby for years.

There were all sorts of solidified paints, and a good number of very old brushes, most of which disintegrated to dust when I rubbed the bristles. However, there were a couple of brushes which he had obviously used, and they still felt OK. I destroyed one a few years ago when I accidentally got superglue on the bristles, but the other is still going strong. Here it is, in the foreground, in action yesterday:

I use this a lot for (for example) applying baseboard-green paint to the bases of my figures, a situation in which I would not choose to involve any of my Series 7 brushes, since the paint is simply latex emulsion paint for interior walls, and they get bunged up.

Things get a bit more sinister if you check the other side of this brush. 

The logo indicates that it comes from HM Stationery Office, was from the 1966 stock, and must have been liberated from the drawing office at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's electrical engineering section at Risley, Lancashire, when my dad worked there as an engineer in the 1970s. I also found a large number of high-quality boxed Beryl pencils - mostly sketching grades like 2B, which is not a lot of use to me - which may have been liberated around the same time. I prefer not to believe that my dad was in the habit of nicking stuff from work, so I'm sure there must be a more comfortable explanation if I could just think of it...

Anyway, my point is that I have a sable brush here which was new in 1966, which my dad must have used for his watercolours from about 1969-1978, and which I have been using regularly for my wargame painting since 2008. I guess the amount of use is probably not as high as you might estimate, but I'm astonished that the sable bristles are still in good shape. It is just one of my "gash" brushes - it gets no special treatment.

Anyone got an older brush which is still in use?

Topic 3: Some Thoughts about Shiny Soldiers

In a convoluted way, this follows on from a conversation I had with Stryker recently, about the implications of applying gloss varnish to miniature soldiers, and what defines an "appropriate" painting style for the Shiny Brigade. Rather famously, he has been doing this for years with his beautiful Napoleonic Hinton Hunts, but it is a new departure for me, starting with my new involvement at the end of 2019 in the Malburian period .

Deciding which bottle of varnish to use to finish your soldiers seems like a mere detail, though there are practical considerations, such as the common trick of using gloss varnish followed by matte, to give a hard-wearing coat. I'm concerned in this note mainly with the "look" of the soldiers, and with some things I have learned about my reaction to my own shiny armies. This will all be extremely personal - what I like and what I'm trying to achieve with my collection will certainly be regarded as strange, or even unacceptable, to others. Some things which I hadn't really thought about became apparent when I started working on the armies. I developed some preferences and some definite views which I hadn't considered previously.

First thing, which came as a bit of a surprise, is that I find that what I'm putting together is not a museum of perfect historic miniatures, or a miniature facsimile of a real army, but is just a collection of toy soldiers. Yes - toys. It's OK - I enjoy, nay, celebrate the fact that they are toys!

Last week I watched the first of the later, colour episodes of Callan, from UK TV back in 1970. Illustrative point. It turns out, you see, that Callan has been moved into a different apartment after his spell in hospital, and his colleague, Cross (Patrick Mower - I hope you're taking notes here), teases him about his box of "toys". Callan gets very scratchy about this, and insists that they are "model soldiers". This is where Callan and I part company; I would have been quite happy that they be regarded as toys. In any case, Patrick Mower spent his later career stuck in some ghastly UK TV Soap [Emmerdale], so in the long run he is in no position to make fun of Callan's toys. [Bastard].

 

Callan keeps his entire collection of model soldiers in a single "Banner" shirt box. Even in 1970, that makes him a dabbler in my book...

Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.

* If I were to paint up a beautiful little model of a WW1 machine-gun team for wargaming, complete with basing involving mud, wire and sandbags, I would never think of giving it a shiny finish. Without pondering too hard about it, it just feels wrong.

* So, if my WSS collection are toys, why? What's the difference?

* I read an article somewhere which suggested that maybe it makes the dreadful idea of conflict and slaughter more acceptable as an entertainment, if the participants are toy-like, and the game is abstracted to the point where there are no dead men or horses cluttering up the field? - Interesting, and possible, but that's not my chief driver, I think.

* A lot must be to do with my figure supplier. I go on rather a lot about the old Les Higgins castings I use - probably rather more than general levels of interest might justify. In the past I've had appreciative comments from John Ray and from David (of the Not By Appointment blog), both men of refined tastes,  about the realistic human proportions of my toys, and the elegance of the sculpture. Cue a round of applause for the late Les Higgins. But there is something more here: the stylised poses, the delicacy of the little men, their strangely androgynous appeal, the bobbed hair, the shapely calves in stockings...

 

Joli Tambour. You may join me in observing that this picture from an ancient children's book seems to show a drummer wearing the French King's Livery  [Lee will especially appreciate this] 

Nailed it.

These guys are straight out of the French nursery-rhyme books of my childhood, when pretty drummer boys caught the eye of the King's daughter, and all that. They do not have smelly feet, or buck teeth, or outsized, garden-gnome hands; they do not relieve themselves behind your hedge, or burn down your barn - they are just lovely toys, of a very old-fashioned style. Thus it suits me to paint and present them as such, with appropriate overtones of a bygone age, and toy soldiers have to be shiny; it's as natural as, well, something or other that I can't quite put my finger on at the moment. 

There are implications, some of them not obvious, for painting, and I have to thank Lee and Goya and a couple of other kind souls who have generously suppressed some elements of their natural painting styles in support of this idiosyncrasy of mine; if the painting is too impressionistic or too layered then gloss varnish can produce bizarre results. A simple, colourful style lends itself well to the presentation, and the toy units will then move around the field in colourful, rigid formations. They can fight Schellenberg if you wish, but it will be Toy Schellenberg - as my brain ages, I find that my rules are becoming more toy-like, as well.

When I started on this, I had very little idea what I was aiming for, other than clues I could get from what Eric and others had done before me, but what is evolving is a little, personal subculture and some better developed guidelines on how I like things done. This is not based on any series of decrees; I have rarely said, "this is how it will be", but I have frequently said, "Gosh, I really like that", and very occasionally I have said (of my own work), "oops...".

Quite soon, when my WSS Phase 1 is complete (the delay is likely to be associated with non-appearance of staff figures, but I'm working on that), I'll produce full team photos and pay tribute to the heroes who have helped me so much over the last couple of years, but I haven't quite got there yet. I'm constantly amazed by how much I have learned along the way.