Spanish regulares

 The colonial warfare of the 18th, 19th and early 20th century are my favourite historical period. Not that I am not interested in other periods too as you can see from my different projects:-))

I am always after the lesser known campaign and armies which you can recognise when you see the armies of my own production.

Here I have such a lesser known unit, the Spanish regulares. Something similar to German or Italian Askaris, KAR etc.

This year it is the 100th aniversary of their birth, so take a look at this exhebition which shows great photos. Just in case that a Spanish hobbyfriend is reading this and has the chance to visit the exhibition - I am interested in the uniformplates on this walls!!!:-))) But not this one as it already available from Ferrer-Delmau, the great Spanish painter.

Or of course from Bueno and other painters.  And maybe a project for the own production.

Another news from the Phyrus project

Well, just three weeks to the DUZI as I said. And then it will be on show - the battle of Asculum, Pyrrhus fighting the Romans. So far we have 11.502 figures painted (after the list I have carefully organised).

In two weeks we will have a meeting to glue the figures on the plates, organising the units and create some vignettes. Stephan Berry who supports the project sent me this photos of some conversions he started several month ago. I just wanted to show them here before you see them done in the diorama.

GHQ Miniatures

I have an old page from a German modelling magazine showing GHQ Highlanders and Cuirassiers.
And I never hoped to be able to lay my hands on some of them.

Now John Cunningham from the UK who bought the moulds of a lot of rare 20mm figures and who is casting all this figures surprised me last month with photos from GHQ figures he got. Great stuff and hopefully available from him soon!!!

Another Roman Wagon from Ingo

It seems Ingo wants to make a whole Roman wagon-train:-) They will be all available at the DUZI in three weeks.

Aspern 1809

Maybe you have seen on this blog the photos from our Aspern diorama we created two years ago. Before we started working on it I read several books about the battle and campaign and visited the battlefield. At Essling is the "Schüttkasten" which the French defended against several Austrian onslaught. This Schüttkasten now is a little museum about the battle. In it I found a nice little diorama about the battle itself. Sometimes wrong uniforms and strange formations, but I always like to see dioramas with 1/72 figures and some of the painting-conversions are nice ideas.

Switzerland

We all know Switzerland as a peacful country, famous for its landscape, high prices and especially chocolate!

But in the past the Swiss were famous for their soldiers who as foreign regiments fought in most European armies of the 18th and 19th century.

Alfred had the chance to visit several of their museums and at his facebook page he shows some photos from his trip. Ah seeing this red coats of the 19th century makes me wondering that my Garibaldians still need some more enemies for the 1860 campaign.

See here some photos of Swiss Line and Light infantry in Neapolitan pay


And who wants to create some units too, take a look here at the shop from the guys of Worean who still offer some of Aude historica's 20mm Garibaldi range. Strangly on Aude's homepage they disapperad as well as the English version of the shop.

Kulmbach 2011

Before it is too late for this, I want to show you some photos from the Kulmbach figure-fair one week ago. Some of the photos are from my friend Thomas Mischak who generously allowed me to show them here.

The fair was as usual a great meeting of a lot of friends and very very bad for my money-bag. My library grew by around 20 new books and as there are mostly flats and 54mm figures, just a few 20mm/1/72 ones.

You can see here just a little part of the tent in which the fair is located.

Between the stands always painted 54mm figures

 or flats...

 Meeting friends like the Schilling's

 or Kai Fuhrmann

And finally going from the tent to the contest. Who has the best single figure or best diorama on show?
Here we had a flat figure diorama of Custer's last stand. A very good paintjob. This made me wondering when Italeri will come forward with their US cavalry. And hopefully dismounted too.

Ok not the best I have ever seen in 1/72, but I thought it nice that such a diorama in "our" scale is there on display too. I can't remember right what it was, but something in Germany 1806-10

 Good to see ideas for conversions!

This was my absolut favourite. These Dog warriors are in 1/72!! Sadly they didn't won the price for the best figure. A pity....