The Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge

Welcome to the Painting Challenge. Here you will find the fabulous, fevered work of miniature painters from around the world. While participants come from every ethnicity, gender, age and nationality, they have three things in common: they love miniatures, they enjoy a supportive community, and they want to set themselves against the Challenge. This site features the current year's event along with the archives of past Painting Challenges. Enjoy your visit and remember to come back soon.

Sunday, 3 January 2021

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.