Napoleonics on Two Continents

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A little bit of a painting update, At the start of the year I'd sort of promised myself to get some more Napoleonic troops done, and in the last month I've made a fair bit of progress; with more to come I'm pleased to report.  But for today its a pair of smaller units to begin with.

First of all, a section or platoon of the 41st Infantry for the Detroit campaigns in the War of 1812:

 

Research showed these were in coats without turnback colours, but that the musicians wore white.  These provide authentic regulars to stiffen my Canadian militias.

As ever, doing British uniforms made me wish I was painting anything else, and these being a predominantly Victrix meant that there was no end of fiddly details, and in the case of the torsos, weird vague attempts at details.  They've come on a long way from these.

But as I cobbled these together from a pile of spare parts I shouldn't complain; I got more out of the leftovers than I expected.  

Whilst in lockdown, I've had the time to sort through the plastic backlog, and figure piles, and in doing so found quite a few things I'd forgotten.  And thus the next unit out of the traps was the altogether more pleasurable (to paint) Catalonian Light Infantry, below:

 

These are slender Eagle Miniatures casts, not terribly dynamic, but crisp, decent value and a good match for Perrys'.  The bag I found was of 12 models, good for a couple of companies of skirmishers in Black Powder.  A nice uniform to paint too, though most accounts of Spanish light infantry suggest Blue coats, every illustration of this unit at least displays a rich green.  Given the Spanish circumstance, I think making do with what was available, or following the whims of the commander is doubtless the case.

Time and inspiration are such that I'm getting plenty of painting done, but as Britain risks coming out of hibernation, the possibilities of face to face gaming are beginning to resurface.  Whilst I'm still personally wary, and will be taking fair precautions, I think actual games are on the horizon.  

It's been a while...

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Brush Love

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If you own as many brushes as I, it may be because you've not been looking after them properly, and need to replace them more than you should.  So a quick post for something I hadn't really considered before but have found to be far more useful than the old stand-by.

I like many of you used dish soap (AKA washing up liquid, here in the U of K) to clean my brushes, and whilst it was fairly effective, it was quite harsh, and required a fair bit of abrasion to get the paint shifting.  But I just switched over to actual painters soap, and, it is far better.

Mmmmm.  Nice.

Now this really does the job.  I've found the soap can really shift paint, but also - with acrylics anyway - can be used mid painting to keep a brush in shape and free of clogging, without even effecting the paint.  My approach now is to paint with the soap bloc by my wet palette and not only regularly rinsing the brush, but also stoking it on the soap every few minutes.  Also in between any change of shade.  On top of cleaning detergents the soap also contains the essential oils your brushes need.  Its a lot less unpleasant for them, and for me.  I'd almost go as far as to say moistening brushes in your mouth becomes a sweet experience; if you know what I mean.

And finally you can get the stuff all over the place, every art shop sells it, and at under a fiver a block it strikes me as very reasonably priced.  Check your search engine of choice for details.

Alongside this though, I have recently taken to another sensible adjustment to the painting process, one taken from my airbrushing in a sense.  The wet palette makes mixing paints in bulk with wires, sticks etc impractical, so I tended to use the brush I was painting with instead, a terrible habit.  Not so bad for blending, but murderous for initial mixing, so instead I have reemployed an old brush to live permanently in the palette as a mixing brush.  It still gets regular cleaning, but all it is there for is to do the initial mix that proved so harsh for my brushes.

As for the outcomes of these efforts, well, the next few days will present a little product.

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