Hanoverians and some buildings

 

I finally got the Hanoverians finished this weekend. Happy days. They took longer than they should have (I see a theme developing there), but not due to any lack of enjoyment in painting them. Quite the opposite in fact. I like the simple standing pose with these ones - there’s a certain classic toy soldier charm to it, and it made getting in about them with the paintbrush nice and easy. The landwehr-style caps seems to be how Hanoverian Naps are generally depicted these days, but from what I understand there is a strong case to argue that they wore shakos during the 1815 campaign, which is broadly the time I’m building the Anglo-Allied collection for. Either way, I preferred painting them with the caps, since it always makes a refreshing change from shakos.

Finding the right flag for the unit proved to be quite a challenge. Napflags on the excellent warflag.com website doesn’t have any Hanoverians, and my internet searches didn’t turn up anything readily useable. In the end, I went with one of Warflag’s Hanoverian flags from the War Of the Spanish Succession. I know, it’s probably not the done thing, and I’m stretching the artistic license by about 100 years, but in my defence I would say that not a lot is known about the Hanoverian flags at Waterloo. It’s yellow and red and has a white horse, so it’ll do these lads just fine.

The buildings you see are by Total Battle Miniatures, from their 15mm range. After using their 10mm buildings for a while, I decided the size just wasn’t quite big enough for my 20mm minis. These 15mm buildings on the other hand are an excellent fit for my purposes. As you can see from the officer leading the Hanoverians to church for a quick prayer before battle begins, the buildings are just tall enough to look realistic, but the footprint is not too large.

I’m not the best at painting model buildings. In fact, I often find it a chore, but these TBM models look great on the tabletop. I’ll take some better photos when there’s a chance to use my DSLR again. These pics were all snapped using my tablet, partly because of my own laziness tonight and partly out of consideration for our greyhound, Mr C, who has a rather bizarre fear of the noise of cameras shuttering. The sound of it is enough to leave him trembling in a corner somewhere. We’re not quite sure why.  I suppose like many rescue pets, there’s probably a tale or two that we don’t know about him. Chased once too often by paparazzi, maybe?

This photo is going back quite a few years. Mr C has a lot more grey hairs now than he did back then (a bit like me). Note the black cat. That’s Dewey, our other rescue pet. The look on his face is telling you in no uncertain terms that this seat is well and truly taken. Note also the funky carpet (this is our old house), which we inherited from the previous owners. It somehow survived most of the 10 years we lived there, even though we decided it would absolutely be the first thing to go after we moved in. I later learned it was an Axminster carpet. Probably cost a fortune. I remember it had this special ability of being able to camouflage cat puke and other such nasties for long periods of time. I would occasionally drop wargaming paraphernalia on it, never to be seen again.

Anyway, I digress...

Brunswick line infantry

This Brunswick 3rd line battalion took very little time to paint and a very long time to complete! I originally started it in June but was distracted by various other projects and commitments. I finally had some time off work last week so was able to get them done, but not before a bit of a varnishing disaster along the way...

Having never painted Brunswickers, I wondered how I might be able to make them more visually interesting. I see other painters sometimes contrast the areas by using black and very dark greys, rather than painting them all black. This looks quite good, but I really wanted my figures to be entirely black, with minimal highlights to avoid any sense of them looking grey. They are the 'Black Brunswickers' after all.

The idea I came up with was to use a combination of matt and semi-gloss blacks to create the contrasts I was after. I used matt black on the clothing and a semi-gloss black on selected items like the belts, straps, shako visor etc.

In the end, it looked okay. Not brilliant, but it sort of worked...until for some reason I decided to give the whole lot of them a coat of spray-on matt varnish. I have never varnished any of my 20mm miniatures. There's usually not much need to, since they mostly sit safely on their shelves with only the occasional bit of gaming done at home. However, a few chips and scratches here and there had recently made me wonder whether I should try and protect my painting efforts a bit more. The spray can I tried was supposed to give a matt finish, but once dried it really was more like high gloss! Perhaps I went in too heavy, I'm not sure. Anyway, I ended up wasting a morning having to go back over them with some of the 'Anti-shine' by Warlord Games to knock down the gloss. This worked quite well, but I also repainted some of the matt black areas.

The straps and other parts which were supposed to be semi-gloss have been left looking a bit too shiny for my liking. I might revisit them at some point and dull those areas down as well, but for now I think they've spent far too long on the paint bench, so it's time to move on to another unit.

That next unit will be some Hanoverians; however, I mainly want to focus on terrain for the next couple of months. If I can get these Hanoverians and a few other units painted before the end of the year, I'll be happy with that. 2020 hasn't been the most productive one for me in the hobby, and like a lot of things this year, my plan to make good progress with the British and Allied armies this year has rather gone off the rails. Hopefully, things will get back on track soon.

(As a side note, I recently watched a Youtube video by Liberator240 who talked about the Winsor & Newton Professional Matte Varnish that he recently started using for his figures, so I'm thinking of giving that a try next time - on a test piece first, of course!)