French so far

I tried my hand at taking a shot of the infantry that I've painted so far. They're starting to look quite "mass-ey" I think.

Legere

Here are the latest miniatures off the painting bench, some French Legere.

Because they're almost all blue they're nice and quick to paint - no cuffs to mess about with. The only slightly strange thing about them is that they should really be in hussar style boots but they're all sculpted in trousers. Not really a problem and I think the more colour the better at this scale.

No new colours used on these - the green plumes and epaulettes are as per the volitgeurs in the previous post. The rest is done in the same way as all the other french. I'm much preferring the new musket colour and will go back and redo the grenadies soon to bring them in line with this.

French Voltigeurs

After a long-ish break, more updates. These voltigeurs were fun to paint, though a little awkward to get paint in everywhere due to the poses. I think they're great sculpts though.

Colors here are as per the rest of the french (see step by step on grenadiers) with a couple of additions.

Green plumes and epaulettes are Vallejo Deep Green highlighted with GW Camo Green. I took a look at the Vallejo green paints and most of them are very very thin. Normally that's good but for bright colours I prefer something a bit thicker right out of the pot especially if you're just dabbing it on.

Yellow collars and plumes are the GW Foundation paint Iyanden Darksun with yellow over it.

Finally I changed the colour of the rifles to what Braxen suggested in his original tutorial all along. Vallejo Light Brown 929. It looks better.

On the painting table are a bunch of legere, so those should be next up on here.

Uniform Plates Online

Being a bit too cheap to buy all the Ospreys that I should like I've found the following useful:

Funcken - Premier Empire

A good number of plates on the French. Use the "Prec" and "Suiv" links up in the top left to browse through different pages under the same heading.

Leinhart and Humbert - Les Uniformes de l'Armee Francais

Combines brevity (uniforms are condensed into a square) with detail. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for a key, in French.

Knötel

A huge list, ordered incomprehensibly, and in German. Fortunately my German extends as far as basic country names, which is about all you need for this.

More Knötel, in French

The link goes to French Line Infantry, but the links in the top right will take you to different pages, most of which have a big link to Uniforms. Follow those and look for links saying Planches de Knötel.

Histofig

This site used to have terrible terrible navigation. They've redesigned it to have better navigation, but now they just dump a bunch of plates on you making you open each one to see what treasures it might contain.

Cent Jours

A much better side, but only covering uniforms for the 100 days campaign. Pick an army, then a branch of service, then a regiment and finally click "Uniformes" next to the flag to see the plates.

French Chasseurs

Some French Chasseurs. I spent a bit less time on these than the Cuirassiers and now, looking at them up close, it shows. I think they look fine in the flesh but doing close-ups like this is a bit punishing. The good thing about this blog is that it makes me finish things in order to post them. The down-side is that I can see all my mistakes writ-large.

One thing that would make these look a lot better would have been a better choice of green. I used VJ Goblin Green over VJ Deep Green which looked like it had enough contrast but the darker green just gets lost. I also applied the highlight over too much of the mini. When I get onto Dragoons I'll try a darker base colour and a smaller highlight.

Also, painting teeth on the shabraques at this scale is neither easy or fun. I miss outlining saddle cloths and pistol buckets now, not something I thought I'd say.

French Cuirassiers

I found these a bit annoying and fiddly to paint, though I think they came out looking ok in the end. I'd say they actually have too much detail and some of it obscures things that you'd like to paint - for instance, the cartridge case makes it about impossible to paint the turnbacks. I ended up spending a bit longer on these than I should have done, which was mostly my fault for not going about them in a logical way.

Face, trousers, gloves, jacket, epaulettes and carbine are all done with colours as per the infantry a few posts down.

The yellow cloth is GW Golden Yellow over GW Iyanden Darksun (one of their foundation paints). This doesn't give great contrast, but the foundation paint goes on nicely over a dark undercoat in one coat, and the yellow brightens it up a little.

Plumes and horsetails are just VJ London Grey drybrushed over the undercoat. The sheepskins are white dry brushed over USA Tan Earth.

The black horses are a mix of Iraqi Sand and Black heavily drybrushed over the undercoat, then given a black ink wash. They look ok up close but at any distance its hard to tell they're not just plain black. Next time I'll try something with a bit more contrast.

French Line Officers

Not the best faces in the Adler range in my opinion, but nice and easy to paint at least. I have twenty odd of these done now.

The Adler command strips contain figures based at different angles which makes it a bit awkward to get into a rhythm of painting them. So I cut them apart and base each type of figure individually so I can work along them as a line.