Painting a flag

I'm currently painting a unit of converged Russian grenadiers for the Great Northern War (Busch's Grenadiers). As the usual options I take for flags (Maverick Models, Little Big Men Studios or print out from a book I own) were not available for this unit, I decided to paint one myself.

The material I used was the foil from around the top of a wine bottle. These days, this foil is usually in some sort of plastic but this was an old fashioned metal one (I think aluminium, so not so old fashioned actually), so could be used for a flag as it is paintable and shapeable. I started by folding the foil around the flag pole, then unfolding it again and sticking it to a piece of cardboard for the base layer of paint:



The next step was drawing on the design in gel pen—I had tried pencil, but it was a rather hard one so the drawing did not show up or actually even took off some of the base paint. The design is the classic Russian GNW design of a celestial hand handing down a sword within a circle and wreath. I added a grenade because these are grenadiers:



The design was then painted over in the classic three layer (or two, as the case may be) method. You have to make sure the ink from the gel pen has dried though—mine wasn't quite dry yet the next morning when I tested it - hence the smudges on the left hand (obverse?) side of the flag below:




After painting most of the colours, except the final highlights of the field of the flag, I stuck it onto the grenadier ensign with white glue and painted on the final highlights. It then looks like this:



Not bad, but I prefer the prefab versions—a lot less work :).

Stipsciz Hussars

One our fellow wargame clubs (read: another bunch of guys that plays in each other's attics and garages :) ) in Belgium are the Stipsciz Hussars. Ever since I started on the strange attractor that is Napoleonics in 28mm (the One True Scale) I knew that at some point in time, I would have to paint up the Austrian hussars that gave them their name. That point in time has now come:



The figures are from Alban Miniatures and the flag is from Maverick Models (I use the 'Effect on Material' style of flag). And yes, I know the flag is probably wrong and certainly ridiculously oversized, but I call war gamers' license on this one. My miniatures, my unit, I decide the size of the flags :).

As an aside, I'm reading General de Brigade rules at the moment with the idea of using them for the Napoleonics games. So far we use Black Powder, which is very good and works well, but I want to see what happens with a more specific Napoleonic ruleset. Unfortunately, while the unit pictured above is played as one unit in Black Powder, in GdB it's only one squadron, with typical units being two squadrons. So they might have some friends coming soon :)

As a further aside, the lead two stands have been painted almost a year ago. They have already seen action (including in this year's Crisis game) but have also been featured in one of the 'big name' wargame magazines. Kudos to the first commenter (apart from the S&V guys themselves - that would be cheating :) ) to find magazine and issue.

Some of Rome's finest

And next off the 'painting' desk are these Romans:

 

I put painting in the sentence above between quotes as all I did to these figures was dip and base them. I bought them off eBay (no idea anymore as to who I bought them from) and they were already base painted. So one bath in the dip and some basing later, here they are. I did quickly paint on the very basic shield designs. The letters on them are V and B, being the fifth (actually the fourth in the collection, but who's counting :) ) cohort of Bartholomeus Sinister Grassus' legions.

Tiny Tin Men moving to Blogger

After almost ten years at my own domain (the first post on it was way back in early 2004), with a Movable Type install I managed myself, I have decided to move Tiny Tin Men over to Blogger. The reasons for this are twofold:

• Ease of posting and maintenance. While Movable Type is a very powerful and capable blog platform, it takes quite some effort to maintain and keep up to date (e.g. I'm probably a few versions behind on the installation), which is something that is entirely taken care of by Blogger itself on the new platform. Additionally, posting to Blogger (without third part software - I recommend MarsEdit for those on a Mac platform) is a lot easier, especially when you want to include things like images, which given the subject of the blog is more or less a necessity. This should make it easier for the blog authors (two of us) to post new stuff. 
• Exposure. Like it or not, the big boy in the club of blogging is Blogger - all of the buzz and action around wargaming blogs is in the fairly tight knit Blogger wargame blog community, and Tiny Tin Men fell completely outside that when on my own domain. Even though TTM has been around for a very long time, it gets only a fraction of page views of some of the other wargaming blogs. This is not so much an issue of 'fame' for me as much as one of forcing me to update the blog a bit more regularly. I figure that with more exposure, it will encourage us to post more. 

So, as of this post (which goes out to both blogs), only the new Blogger Tiny Tin Men will get updated. The old (nirya.be) site will remain online as long as I have my domain (which I foresee to be pretty much as long as I'm alive :) ), but posting and commenting to it will be disabled as of now. So everyone point your browsers towards and update your bookmarks to:

http://snv-ttm.blogspot.com

As an aside, I was looking at tinytinmen and ttm as host parts of the URL, but both are taken by blogs that have three posts and are inactive for months, resP. years. Oh well :)

Cossacks!

I'm painting up some Cossacks for my Great Northern War armies. After the mounted ones earlier this year, here are two small units of their footslogging cousins:

Mad Oleg's bunch:



Dashing Dmitro's rabble:



The figures are again from The Assault Group, except for Mad Oleg who is from Foundry (where he is called Red Renko).

More Celts

Following in the footsteps of their cousins the Larii, here are the Arboretes:



Again Warlord Games figures, which I must say are growing on me. These have a few bits from the British Celt box set on them (notably the leader and the spiky haired guy next to him).

(And yes, the peeling shield transfer on said spiky haired person has been fixed since taking this photograph :) ).

Celtic warband

Here are the Larii, a warband of Warlord Games Celts:



While I initially did not like these figures, and am still a bit doubtful about their poses (if you don't pay attention to posing, you end up with a war band of figures in one of two poses: 'I need to go to the toilet NOW' and 'I'm in the process of tripping over this bunch of grass here') I must admit that all ranked up (so to speak) they do look better than expected.

The smithy

And next off the painting desk, again in the category of 'hanging around the edges of the battlefield', the smithy:



Figures are from Wargames Foundry.

Austrian Generals

As usual, Crisis seems to revive my painting mojo, so here's some Austrian Napoleonic generals (or rather, field marshals) including none other than Archduke Charles himself:



The figures are from good old Wargames Foundry.

Napoleonic vignettes & stuff

Past weekend saw the 2012 edition of Crisis in Antwerp, where we presented a game based on the battle of Aspern-Essling in 1809 between Napoleon's French and Archduke Karl's Austrians.

For this game I painted up a number of extra vignette and scenery figures. First off, Foundry's marvellous Bavarian looters with accompanying angry farmer (a Ral Partha Ravenloft 'angry mob' figure kindly donated by Phil). As an aside, the Bavarians were painted up as being from IR 11 Kinkel, inspired by the wonderful plate in Osprey MAA 106 featuring the soldier from that regiment dozing off on the job while holding a piglet (of unknown regimental lineage):



A vivandière (Warlord Games) and a fellow who has sampled too much of her wares (from the Foundry Blacksmith set):



And finally some French casualties (again Foundry):