Massimo's latest project

This morning I've received some photos from Massimo. Custer's last stand. As usual great conversions which will be marvelous when painted1

We have several sets of Sioux on the market, but beside the - in my eyes - terrible Lucky-Toys and the old Atlantic we have no 7th cavalry. Hopefully one manufactor will take care about this in the future

Poles arrived

Maybe you have read the sad story of the payment I made for some Polish masters and what happened afterwards.

Now the good news. On Christmas Bartosz contacted me, telling me that he is very sick and spent a lot of time at the hospital. I asked him to send me the nearly finished figures over now as Andy offered to complete the sculpting. And what a surprise - this time the parcel arrived.

Great figures and sculpting of Napoleonic Polish infantry in the right uniform and correct poses.
So I will send them to Andy now to complete some missing buttons and sabres. Afterwards they will go to the caster and I hope I can offer them for sell soon - and get some of the money for the masters back....

Tell me what do you think about them. Bartosz already did the Russian militia and Spanish Guerillia. I think this Polish infantry here are better then what we have in plastic from him.

We have Fusiliers, Voltigeurs and Grenadiers. As far as I know the only elite companies on the markets since Hinton Hunt. 

BTW, in the backround you can see some old Minifigs S-Range figures from my friend Clive who sent me over some samples for which I asked him.

More HAT Testshots

After painting the NNC I continued with the Frontier Lighthorse. One of them I converted into a Durban mounted Rifleman.
The riders are a little bit too big for the riders, so I guess HAT will change the size of them. A very useful set for the battle of Hlobane or Khambula (the latter another idea of mine for a diorama).

Being in a mood to post today

This noon when I came home I found a parcel with the latest HAT testshots. Wow, what great stuff they sent, late Romans and Sassanids as well as several sets of my favourite colonial war - Zulu!!!

Well after bringing my son to bed I took at once the brush and colours. After 2 1/4 hours see the result of the first testshot - Natal Native Infantry. As my plan is to do Isandhlwana in 1:1 one day I guess I need several hundreds more of them.

Great plastic, easy to paint.

Mysore

As I am in need to get enemies for my own production Sepoys I searched some volunteers to share the costs and now we are down to around 10 Euro each for a master. The first one is already done and it is a Mysorean rocketeer.

While searchig through the blogs of my favourite list, I came over this from Colconda rising which looks really good.

http://golcondarising.blogspot.com/2011/01/native-rockets.html

And here are the photos from the first Mysore master Leo from Argentina sculpted for me in 1/72.

Leuthen the rest

And here are some photos more to round up this diorama

SYW in flat

Since friday I got several mails and reading on forum roumors about Italeri stopping the producion of 1/72 and Zvezda who doesn't want to make any SYW or Napoleonic figures. Well I always thought that some manufactors would go down, but I haven't thought about this two. Well, when Revell stoped around 10-15 years ago we thought this was the end. And how much stuff appeard since then.

Especially for the SYW I hope for HAT. And when they arrive, here is something I would like to copy in "our" scale.

Being a Bavarian I have the pleasure to have the Bavarian army museum in Ingolstadt within easy reach. If you have the chance to visit this museum, do it!!Beside a great collection of uniforms, paintings etc. they have several great flat-figure dioramas. One of them I want to show here. The battle of Leuthen with 17.000 figures. This is the first part of photos I have for this diorama. Imagine the same in 1/72:-)))))

Pyrrhus - Projekt 2011

The anual diorama of our group for this years DUZI in October will be the battle of Asculum fought between Pyrrhus and the Romans.

It was the second battle of Pyrrhus in Italy. Here he fought with a mixture of his own Greek army together with the Greek South Italian city contingents and the Samnites and other Oscan speaking people against the Romans.

I had the idea of this diorama because we can use all the republican Romans from several manufactors as well as most of Alexanders army. And we have the Phalanx winning the battle against the Romans:-))

But the real eyecatcher will be the tank-battle on the Greek left flank. 19 of Pyrrhus elephants against the special anti-elephant wagons the Romans used there. Any Peters will again sculpt the wagons after drawings I gave him and he will create several figures we need to get the right poses. Starting with some more Samnites.

We have already 6000 figures painted so far, but not very balanced. So we need a lot more Romans, Greek Hypaspists as well as cavalry. If anybody wants to join us in the project and lent or sell some figures to me (us) I would be glad if he send me a mail.

The problem is (like in the Hastings diorama) that figures in this close order formations of 8 or 16 deep will cover little space. See for example here the first phalanx I glued on a base. 16x 16 = 256 figures with a standard-bearer and a (missing) fifer. 258 figures on a plate 25x45 cm.


So we will need thousands to cover a plate. Ok, see here the first phalanx in scale 1:1