French SYW update : updated

Another of those peanut butter and jam posts I keep reading about!

I’ve made solid progress with painting my French. I reckon I’m about half way through them now. It’s taken me somewhere in the region of 13-14 hours. I still have the following steps to take:

Artillery cuffs & turnbacks

Cavalry cuffs & some saddlecloths

Cavalry breast plates & swords

Horses - main coat colour where not black, blazes etc 

Infantry cross belts

Infantry barrels and bayonets

Some grenadier bearskin bags*

Flags (have to be painted!)

Basing and texturing

Touching up

General staff - 14 figures undercoated but otherwise untouched 

Half brigade of cavalry - 10 figures, ditto 

I might be ready to get them in the table for a game by the first weekend of August.

This will give me 11.5 brigades of infantry, 8.5 of cavalry, 6 of artillery and 5 stands of staff. Each horse/foot/gun brigade is two bases. I’m half a brigade short of what I need for Rossbach due to a miscalculation. I prefer to order the shortfall when I place the next order rather than ordering  them on their own. So I will slip a base of Austrians in.

The good news for me is that I’m not massively short of the additional figures needed for Minden and Fontenoy. I received the figures I need from Irregular that I can’t get from H&R (dismounted dragoons for the French and horse grenadiers in mitres for the Brits/Hanoverians). A point to note here is that I am not being totally faithful to the uniforms of units in the respective orbats though. I’ll have roughly the right proportions of white, blue and red-coats in the French armies, but what will be Irish and Gardes Suisses in one battle will be Swiss line in another (Red); and Gardes Francaises at Fontenoy will be German regiments in the SYW (blue). Gives me a conundrum with the flags though.

Sorry I forgot to take any snaps of the WIP. I’ll try to remember tomorrow.

* I’ve gone for the partially anachronistic choice of bearskin capped grenadiers. These didn’t become common until 1759, but I like em. Prior to that, they were nearly all in tricorns. I mean, make an effort to look like proper grenadiers Frenchies! The other reason I’m doing them in bearskins is because of the Blandford SYW book that we consulted in our school wargame group. That showed a moustachioed grenadier of the Swiss Regiment de Diesbach in bearskin in the section on Rossbach. One of our number drew the understandable conclusion that it was a whole regiment of grenadiers, rather than it just being the flank company. So it is in his honour I have rejected the more historical tricorn.

It seems that there’s a fair amount of scepticism about progress, especially coming from some of the other 5i partner countries 😉. So I present here for your eyes, some evidence of peanut butter and, if not jelly, st least the promise of ‘jam tomorrow’ (to mix the metaphors).

A general view of 7 brigades’ worth of infantry. 3 French; 1 German; 3 Swiss/Irish. They’ll look better when the black from the sprayed undercoat on the bases is covered up.

Next up the cavalry, guns and remaining infantry.

Anyone seen a field gun lying around? Somehow one has broken free of its PVA bonding and has gone wheel about. I need to lighten up some of those horses. 

Finally, a closer shot of the infantry command.