Our project for the Dioramica - The battle of Hastings 1066

On the weekend of the 19th to 20th November will be the first fair for 1/72 - and only 1/72:-)

If you are interested in visiting us take a look at  http://www.dioramica.de/
Check the names who will be there and see what you miss if you don't come to visit it!!

When Wolfgang asked us what we have in mind for the fair Schmitty sugested that we should put our Hastings diorama on show. I thought a good idea for the 950th aniversary so I agreed.

Well, yesterday I thought myself "what have I done" when sitting the whole afternoon to glue the units on the stands. In the end I had 1350 Anglosaxons, 450 Norman infantry and around 100 Norman cavalry on the plates. Just 100 special figures left who don't fit in a shieldwall.

I hope Schmitty has much more Normans than I because it is difficult to explain why they won the battle showing these numbers:-)

If anybody of you has painted figures for the two armies and want to join our group (or wants to sell his figures) please send me a mail. It would be great to see the battle in 1:1 scale, but of course this is just a dream.

Here the photos of my armies for the project.

The French in Indochina 1883-85

Colonial campaigns in the 19th century are very up the list of my favorite campaigns.
There is a lot written about all the British wars in the 19th century and as a German I have access to all the German books about our campaigns.

With other languages I have my problems to read and you can't find much about other nations colonial wars in English.

One of the very interesting subjects in my eyes are the French campaigns in the second half of the 19th century. There is material of campaigns in North Africa available, mostly involving the Foreign legion.  Lesser on the campaigns again Samori.

What I searched for a long time are books on the French conquest of Tonkin (part of Vietnam today) and the Sino-French war.

Wikipedia has a lot of articles about this campaign. Some years ago I printed over 200 pages of detailed accounts of all the battles there. Now I found this link which describes the campaign on a few pages.

In the past I painted French colonials simply from British Zulu-war infantry. You see the uniform is nearly similar

With a head-conversion you have Zouaves and Turkos in Indochina

And there are the local units - Tirallieurs Anamites, Conchinoise etc. etc.

There enemies are much more difficult. First the Anamites

After they were fought down by the French the war continued as the Sino-French war. The enemies for the French were now the Chinese Black Flags

Ok, enough uniformplates for now. As some years ago I asked Ingo to make me some Anamites after finishing some other projects I asked him to sculpt for me the Tirallieurs Anamites and some blackflags too.  Here the result

The Chinese (could be used as regulars for the Sino-Japanese and up to the Boxer-Rebellion too.

And the Tirallieurs

Andy told me nobody would be interested in my obscure ideas. Make him wrong and take a look at these guys in our shop :-)

Something from the Peninsular war

Yesterday I got my parcel from Andy with the new figures for the shop. When I wanted to put in the article in the shop I took the photos from the blog and thought the Portuguese look like British?

Ok, seems to have been a busy week. Now you have the real Portuguese on the former post.

Staying with the Peninsular war - in my old photos I scanned I found the diorama I started on Albuera 1811. The campaign of 1811 is in my eyes the most interesting in the war. And at Albuera we have a lot of Spaniards too, so very colorful.

These photos are now nearly 20 years old. I used British infantry in Belgian shako and had just a few metals in Peninsular uniform. The Portuguese are simply painted HAT British light infantry, the British heavy dragoons converted Italeri 1806 Prussian cuirassiers and a few metals. 

French horse artillery in Bardin uniform etc. etc. 

But today we are happy to have most figures available in 1/72. And the ones that are not, we simply make ourselves:-)

 Another mistake - Regiment Irlanda in dark blue....

Guardias Wallonas - Pieter already has them on his list for next years production:-)

Finally the photos from the Royal Fusiliers museum in the Tower in London

Steve has an interesting article on the Spanish uniforms at Albuera at his blog. I do not agree with everything regarding the British supplied uniforms in this period and prefer the more colorful versions in this period his article is a really great one.