From PeteF: Napoleon's Old School 7th Dragoons for Quatres Bras (180 points)

The next unit for the the Quatres Bras project is the 7th Dragoons - most of the figures for this project (and all of the 7th Dragoons) are 25mm Minifigs from the 1980s/early 1990s. The idea is to build up a big enough French army to take on the Anglo-Allied army that I inherited.

My dad followed a 25:1 ratio for the Anglo Allied army including the cavalry. Since I like to base them in 3s and think units of 12, 18, 24 and 30 work best on the table top I'm being a bit more flexible with the ratio - also, large cavalry units like this take me a long time to paint!

A lot of things didn't get done last week so that I could finish these guys before starting a new job next week - from the dogs being walked less to taking down the Christmas decorations. We may have eaten more fast food than usual. However, I'm mostly happy with the result. 

I found it quite tricky to get the shade of green I wanted - back in October I nearly sprung for a set of Napoleonic paints from Foundry before the Challenge.  Maybe later this year. The purpley red was a bit tricky too. With horses I made all the non bugler horses bays using a fairly simple recipe - I may change it up in one of the forthcoming regiments to have a bit more variation - my understanding is they tried for a degree of uniformity - at least on parade.

Anyone familiar with the N10 charging heavy cavalry horse may notice that I left one of the supports on the front legs. If you cut both of the supports then the front of horse slowly droops over time so a lot of my dad's cavalry has to be reset before each wargame. In some cases the hind legs eventually need repair.

Most of these figures are from a load that I scored for a great price this summer from a local wargamer selling off their French Napoleonic collection - since a horse, rider and postage comes to around $5.50 I was very lucky to find these. Calivers is great for filling gaps but even though I love Minifigs, the price for whole regiments is a bit tasty - even for the high nostalgia value.

18 x 25mm cavalry for a total of 180 points.