Tiny Eckmühl

Scenario with orders of battle here

I have just finished reading the first volume of Thunder on the Danube, and for motivation and honestly a little bit of change I have thrown together a small scenario for this historical engagement. It's for my own rules and has limited time and space as a priority. We finished the game in about 1,5 hours. 

On the picture above, the French had finished deploying, which the Austrians observe with some concern. The Emperor chose to bring forward the heavy cavalry instead of the lights.

More men-at-arms

With this, 11 of 12 Perry riders are complete. They are very fun to assemble and paint. I believe this time there are no mis-matched left and right arms as well.

Landsknecht Command

Here's a sample of what I have been painting recently: a bunch of various Renaissance characters. 28mm figures take more time to paint , but hopefully there is a return in the quality.

The next project - 1806 Prussians

I already have two obscure armies for my 1/72 Napoleonics, early Spaniards and Ottomans, and I'd like to continue the tendency, so I started assembling an 1806 Prussian army:

• Generals will be made out of Italeri Austrian officers.
• HäT sets actually run at very low prices, like 5£ for a box, so I bought three boxes of infantry, two line and one fusiliers (that's nine units of 16 figures each).
• Also laid my hands on three boxes of Italeri Prussian cavalry, of which a dozen will be Austrian dragoons with head swaps and the rest Prussian cuirassiers and dragoons as well.
• I have some gunners left from those I used for Spaniards, and the Spanish crews and guns can easily be used.
• Revell SYW Prussian hussars will do just fine as their 1806 counterparts, I'm painting up two units of six riders each.

I also stockpiled more Napoleonics in general, including more HäT sets, some French foot dragoons and a few more Ottomans.

Ottomen on the Horizon

(For the less linguistically inclined, Ottomen is the plural of Ottoman.)

I have not been as idle in recent times as the lack of updates suggests. I suspect mainly the fact that the camera is still broken deters me from taking loads of pictures. Anyway, the Napoleonic Ottoman army is almost complete (which army ever is?), so I thought I'd take them out to the sun and show them to the world.

A talk in the park

The Ultima Ratio French musketeers set has eight lady figures, a pair on each sprue, which is quite excessive, so I painted up this two and gave them away.

Not much to tell, they were quite nice to paint. The base is 2mm plasticard sanded to an oval shape, the rocks are real pebbles and the bed of the stream is made of natural white sand. Also, sorry for the grainy pictures, I can't always use natural light to do this.

A Practice Pollaxe / Polehammer

We (or more precisely I) have been ordering synthetic sparring weapons from The Knight Shop, and we now have a decent array of them. However, nobody makes a synthetic polehammer, so I made one from wood, and why not go for the looks once I chose to do it?

I really like the pattern on the metallic bits, which was achieved with a drybrush and then a dark metallic wash.

Looting on Labour Day

So it happens that I ran out of 2mm plasticard, like totally, for the first time. And then yesterday we were messing with the family car in a Tesco parking lot... and next to the trash container there were a big bunch of plasticard boards, which they hang from the ceiling to promote sales. So I took a bunch of them. The same amount is probably worth 40-50£ when bought from a store. Wishing the same amount of free hobby loot for all of my readers :)

Purchase history, April+May

While I'm still spending lots of resources on driving lessons, I still had a lot of extra income, so I went on quite a spending spree.

Figures:

• A small order from Steel Fist Miniatures
• A large order of Landsknechts from Warlord (got a promotion code)
• Vallejo paints (still to be collected)

Misc.:

• wooden poles to make practice poleaxes
• textile paint, shield boss and glue to make a small shield
• new pommels and basket hilt for our practice swords

I hope I can photograph some of the output soon, as I've been making steady progress on the Warlord and Perry figures.