French dragoons

I finished painting my first unit of dragoons just before Christmas, but with all the festivities I'm only getting round to taking a couple of photos of them today.

Considering how long I've been collecting this French army, this is a long overdue addition, and there will be more to follow at some point soon, along with some other French cavalry I think.

Next year will see me start work on my British Napoleonic army, as well as some Portugese and other allied contingents. I'm not exactly sure when I'll begin this - and it may be on the spur of the moment - but for the time being I would like to press on with the French and Prussians. There's still more to do for both these armies, and it would be good to see them more or less finished before starting a new project.

My dragoons performed well in their first outing on the battlefield yesterday, claiming two victory banners during a replay of Dennewitz 1813 using Commands & Colors (sorry no pics - I did take some with my phone but they're awful). The French won fairly comfortably in the end with a final victory banner count of 7-5 and most of the fighting taking place in the centre and on the Prussian right flank. I'll try to be better organised next time so I have some photos to share of the game.

Some more uhlans...

I added to my Prussian uhlans this week with a few more bases. It's always nice to get a second rank finished to swell the numbers.

My thanks again to Sean from Newline Designs for taking the time to add these new sculpts to the range. They were absolutely worth the wait.

I'm looking forward to getting them onto the table for their first battle.

I'm not done yet with the Prussian cavalry, but this week I think I'll turn my attention back to the French army and work on some light infantry and (finally!) some dragoons.

Prussian uhlans!

A while back, in the course of building up my Prussian army, I got in touch with Sean at Newline Designs to ask him what he thought would be the most suitable figures in his range to use to represent Prussian uhlans. The Newline range is pretty extensive, but one thing I noticed that was missing for the Prussians was lancers.

My main reason for wanting to add lancers to the collection was that they are represented in the Commands & Colors game as a distinct unit type - plus, I've noticed many other Napoleonic rulesets have separate rules to distinguish uhlans from other types of Prussian cavalry. Regardless of rule requirements, though, I think lancers were a pretty cool feature of the Napoleonic battlefield, so I thought they would make a great addition to the collection.

So, my plan was to do some sort of conversion, perhaps using dragoons or mounted landwehr models as a basis, or something from one of the other nations. However, being the throughly nice chap that he his, Sean at Newline (after going away and done a bit of research of his own) decided that he would sculpt some new minis and add them to the range.

Fast forward a number of months to last week when I received a very pleasant surprise email from Sean saying he was sending me some goodies in the post. Needless to say, I was more than just a little excited, and sure enough the next day our postie delivered a very generous bag of 20mm metal goodies. Uhlans!

All other painting was immediately put on hold as I got stuck right into the first batch of these guys. And a real pleasure to paint they were too!

I'm pleased Sean decided to depict them wearing the kollet rather than the litewka, since it helps add a bit of variety to the Prussian cavalry units, which already have dragoons and landwehr wearing the litewka.

Prussian uhlans have quite an interesting history in terms of the formation of the various regiments and the different uniforms that they sometimes had. These ones I've painted are meant to represent the 1st (West Prussian) regiment, which had yellow buttons and white shoulder straps.

As with the French line lancers I did a while back, I decided to use wire lances instead of the cast ones that are supplied. The cast ones are perfectly fine, but I just prefer using the slightly slimmer wire ones.

For reference, I used Digby's Smith's The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of the Uniforms of the Napoleonic Wars, which has some cracking illustrations. And I've also recently expanded my reference library by picking up the Blandford Colour series of books on the Napoleonic Wars, which are also very insightful. Peter Hofschröer's book from the Osprey series was also an excellent source of information - the second volume covers the Prussian cavalry from 1807 to 1815.

Illustration plate from the book by Digby Smith on Napoleonic uniforms. I can highly recommend it!

A plate showing Prussian uhlans from Uniforms of Waterloo by Philip Haythornthwaite

With the other uhlans I have still to paint, I am contemplating using some of them as a basis for a unit of Prussian National Cavalry. The illustration above of the trooper from the Pomerian National Cavalry regiment got me thinking that I could basically use the same uhlan miniatures to represent this regiment because the uniforms are pretty much the same. However, I'd need to give them sabres instead of lances, so I'll see.

Anyway, if like me you've been waiting for the chance to add 20mm Prussian uhlans to your army, then I'm sure Sean will have these excellent new miniatures available on his website in the near future!