6mm Prussian Army 1813/14

This is the Prussian army I finished a couple of months ago. All figures are Baccus and I'm looking forward to getting them in action - there's plenty of French just waiting for them in the garage. Next up is some Austrians to get that Battle of the Nations feel (the Russians are patiently waiting in the garage too).

The artillery

Dragoons

Hussars

Infantry

More Infantry

Kuirassiers

Landwehr cavalry

Landwehr infantry

Staff Officers

Uhlans

The complete muster is

• 22 infantry battalions
• 11 Landwehr infantry battalions
• 7 Landwehr cavalry squadrons
• 7 Uhlan squadrons
• 2 Kuirassier squadrons
• 2 Dragoon squadrons
• 4 Hussar squadrons
• 12 cannon
• 8 officer stands

Will need to get them together for a group shot soon!

6mm Prussian Infantry

Before I got distracted by the Great Game, various Blood Red Skies aircraft and the odd Seventeenth Century Dutch ship  I was busy building some 6mm Napoleonic armies. Many of these I actually had commissioned but the Prussian army is all my own work.

Last weekend saw the final touches put to the basic Prussian Infantry.

There are 22 regiments in all, based on the assumption of three stands per unit, which should allow some major engagements to be fought.

Next up are twelve Landwehr units (one already completed), a few pieces of artillery and then a huge amount of cavalry.

All figures are Baccus. 

Soumy Regiment in 6mm

Back in February I scribbled together a description of speed painting some Russian Hussars for the 1812 campaign (it can be found here ). Well, I finally got round to basing the Soumy regiment, so they are now ready to face the French Emperor and his minions.



All figures are Baccus

Napoleonic Russian Infantry

More 6mm infantry to add to the hordes gathering in the garage, this time some 6mm Russian infantry.

I continued my experiment of using a coloured base coat on these, this time GW's Caliban Green spray was used. Again, I was pretty pleased with the results with most of my mistakes being hidden from the casual observer simply due to the scale of the figures.

I have been painting my Russian infantry as generic so that they can be added to any unit but of course this is not the case for bases with standards. For reference the white standards represent Siberian regiments and the coloured one a Kazan regiment. The Kazan regiment is still carrying the 1797 issue flag (the others are 1803).

These were part of a productive afternoon of basing I had - note the other regiments were only based by me not painted (see Cheating ).

These included some French lancers, Imperial Guard lancers, Cossacks, Russian and French foot artillery.

Russian Generals

Some Napoleonic Russian generals to take command in the upcoming 1812 campaign.

Corps and Divisional commanders

Learned a couple of lessons from these, firstly using an alternative colour base spray really works - in this case I used Mournfang brown from GW. This gave a good coverage on the horses, most of which were going to be some shade of brown in any case.

I was worried that the lighter colour base coat might highlight patches I've missed (I have had some horrible experiences with white on 28mm in the past) but I seem to have got away with it this time.

Secondly I found painting on lollipop stick good as always but using PVA to stick 6mm troops to them just causes difficulties when trying to pop them off. Back to the venerated Blue Peter tradition of double sided sticky tape in future!


All figures are Baccus.

6mm Hussars - speed paint

Prevarication is my middle name, well not really but if my parents had bothered to give me a middle name (they felt it was surplus to requirements, possibly like myself) prevarication would have been high on the list.

Along with 'Oi you!', 'Don't touch that' and 'what have you done now'.

So rather than actually painting stuff I tend to deflect my attention onto reading how others paint stuff and generally achieve something in their lives.

But every so often I give something a go and one Saturday afternoon in February I decided to see how quickly I could blob paint on a squadron of 6mm Russian hussars. That's 9 figures, all Baccus.


14:50 All set for my dubious attentions

All were stuck on a lolly stick which Amazon sell in batches of a hundred or so at a ridiculous rate which can in no way be sustainable (either as a business model or a rain forest).

Undercoat was just a watered down slap dash of citadel Abbadon Black.

14:55 Undercoat splattering achieved!

Of course this takes a bit of time to dry so to encourage them I switched on the spare fan heater in the office. Don't know if it achieved anything but I felt at least I had done something. The industrious amongst you might have considered painting something else and I did glance wistfully at the 28mm Napoleonic French infantry battalion that has been sitting on the desk waiting to be PVA'ed onto MDF for over two years. But, I must confess, after all this time I find it difficult to establish eye contact with the blighters; its an old romance gone stale.

Drying done, then horses time. Straightforward coat of Mournfang Brown for the lot bar the trumpeter's that got dabbed in Celestial Grey.

15:08 Brown horses... other colours are available but not in my army

In future I'm going to do horses by setting the airbrush on them. This should mean I can get that colour done on an industrial scale, which is just as well as I have an industrial scale backlog.

Things quickened now as I could splat different colours on as others dried. Russian hussar regiments don't have the diversity of colours that adorn some nations. I decided these would be a squadron from the Soumy regiment mostly because they had red breeches and grey everything else and I thought that would break up the uniform bottle green of the rest of the army.

15:15 Grey pelisse, dolman and saddle cloths added

15:19 A dash of red on the trousers

15:25 Hands and faces on

15:28 Swords

15:34 White detailing.

The white braiding doesn't show up well in the photograph partially because of the scale of the figures but mostly because I didn't want to waste my eye sight painting it!

15:36 Sabretache red detail

15:50 Bases and tidy up

The completed squadron

In all it took 55 minutes... sure I can go faster and probably be neater/more detailed.

But that's them ready to hit the basing manufactorium in the garage.

Wait, did I just use the word 'manufactorium'? Games Workshop have a lot to answer for...

Cheating

So, I've got a new scale (6mm) and a desire not to increase my mountain of unpainted lead/plastic/resin. The other clever, sensible , intelligent half (well you never know who might be reading) suggested that perhaps I would like to get troops painted for me.

My pride (such a better word to use than pig headedness) immediately rebelled at the concept, after all I enjoyed painting even if I progressed at a pace that could only rival a snail or particularly lethargic tortoise.

Then I tried painting the little... miniature masterpieces.

Before I knew it I was on EBay searching for 6mm painted Napoleonics. There were a couple about at a reasonable price and after paying for some samples I settled on sennacherIb33.

These arrive loose so I do have to base them myself but this means the basing is consistently [insert your chosen adjective here].

Mostly I have been doing Russians (all figures are Baccus):

It's All About the Base

Of course basing is all down to the rules you are planning to fight your battles with. I'm sure you will be unsurprised to discover that at the start of the 6mm project I owned several sets:

• Napoleon
• Waterloo
• Republic to Empire
• Blucher

And since embarking on the venture have added two more:

• Polemos
• Et sans Resultat

Of these I have only actually played one, Republic to Empire and that's only because I haunt The League of Augsburg's weekenders and one day games. These have been played using 28mm on huge tables but conversion shouldn't be difficult.

Waterloo looks fun (betraying the GW background, again) and Blucher deals in base widths for distance so you can easily adapt it (the rules default to standard playing card dimensions).

Polemos is designed for 6mm but is stringent on basing and Et sans Resultat actually adapts to the size of the bases (effectively if a small battalion is on this size of base then use this scale).

I didn't want my basing choice to prevent me from trying every set out and so went for something that could easily be put into a selection of sabot bases, 20mm x 20mm.

Ready for Republic to Empire

Or Polemos

Or Blucher

For the bigger bases I went in for some decoration adding officers, skirmishers and so on. For the Blucher ones I can even have two units on the same base to give it more of a brigade feel.

There's also some space for unit tags.

Unit Name and three ranks

Two squadrons

With skirmishers

I also decided to make some of my French units a bit more close order than they would normally appear, giving them three ranks instead of the standard two. Not sure if I will continue with this as it does make the enterprise more expensive given the way Baccus (my 6mm pusher of choice) package their troops.

So I have rules, units and space... now to get to a fight!

The 6mm Solution

Regular perusers of this blog will have noticed a slight trend forming (ok two slight trends but I'm ignoring the 40K bit for now), the appearance over the last year or so of 6mm Napoleonics.

Up until now I have pretty much stuck with 28mm with the exception of some 15mm for Flames of War. But I have limited space to campaign, at a stretch I can set up a 12X6 table in the room formerly referred to as our garage (I know this is riches to many) but even at that size it's not going to be able to be transformed into Borodino or Austerlitz at that scale.

And that's before I get to thinking aout the figures required and the time needed to paint them - a constant source of moaning on these virtual pages.

So, I finally came to the conclusion that much as I love the pomp and well turned heel of the modern 28mm figure, if I want to recreate conflict in the grand Napoleonic manner then I would have to think small.

About 6mm in fact. This would give me a reasonable groundscale to fight the most famous Napoleonic conflicts at home.

28mm Perry French Infantry and 6mm Baccus Russian cannon

Now I needed an excuse to get another mountain of lead past the better, smarter, purse-string holding half (a bit of indiscriminate flattery just in case she happens upon this article). Don't get me wrong the better half is very supportive of my hobby, partially as it excuses her dalliances with all things cross-stitch but mostly as it keeps me in a small controlled space where interaction with her friends and our neighbours is minimised, along with all the associated embarrassemnt that brings. The better half's main concern was,like most in the hobby, I spend much more time buying and painting miniatures than I do actually playing with them. Things get painted and then boxed away on a shelf without a chance of every answering a bugle call or more likely just get shelved and left unbuilt.

So I made a deal, I would indulge this diversion if I could purchase pre-painted units. I identified a couple of painters on eBay and after getting samples settled on one. This has proved a good way to build the collection, for a modest (in hobby terms) outlay I can receive a few ready painted battallions and all I have to do is base them and get them on the table.

Part of a Waterloo test set up in the garage. Figures Baccus, cloth  Cigar Box Battles

Tricky bit over I thought; basing them, that sounds easy, then I made the mistake of looking on TMP for some rational deabate on the subject...

6mm French Imperial Guard Horse Artillery

Flitting quickly between nations on the 6mm front. Here is a battery of French Imperial Guard Horse Artillery.

Now the question is should I invest the time in putting together some limbers? They'll look good but will they be used?

All figures are Baccus.

6mm Prussian Uhlans

These are the first 6mm cavalry I've done. Quite enjoyed painting them not least because they were quick to finish and base.

They represent the 1st, 2nd and 3rd regiments all of which were part of Blucher's force during the hundred days. For the 6mm painter the only fundamental difference between them is the colour of their pennants.

Still got another five or six units to complete.

All miniatures are Baccus.

Hougoumont

Another 6mm gem from Total Battle Miniatures, hopefully not too marred by my brushstrokes. A delight to paint and I may even get to game with it soon!