French Artillery 9.9.13

As you will know if you've been following my blog lately I have been mostly concentrating on late war allied armies as my brother and nephew are meant to be working on the French. Anyway I burned myself out on Prussians this past couple of months so I have been messing around killing time cleaning up the odd unit while waiting for my painting flow to return. 

    

Well a few years back my wife wasn't working and despite myself working horrible, horrible extra hours I didn't have a huge amount of spare cash to buy unpainted armies from Fighting 15's. So I was always on the look out for a bargain (eBay lots with 'out of focus' pics and the odd low priced 'buy it now' item etc). In the end I picked up quite a few batches of heavily painted AB figures. Some I thought I could save but most that I felt were destined for a swim in the green. 

   

In amongst these lots was a number of French artillery figures poorly based with sand up their legs plus the flash left on and very roughly painted with a gloss dark blue finish. Well last week I took the notion to get stuck into them, I pulled them off the bases then cleaned off the flash and sand and tried my best to take the colours to an even base coat before mounting them on bases (I felt if I could get them on the bases there would be a better chance of me finishing them!).

   

Then I planned on what paints to highlight with and really went to town with them. I had no idea how the uniform highlight would look until I matt varnished them. I was amazed how well they came up but I did spend an awful lot of time on them. I have 2 batteries based up but stopped short of doing the 2nd at the moment as the 1st was a killer!

    

So now I have a new French battery to add to my collection and I'm chuffed how they turned out. The crew men may be out of position around the guns as I haven't looked at this for years, I did have a good search online but couldn't find the info I needed so they will just have to do.
   
Out of all the figures I picked up I have 2 foot batteries as well as a 3 gun guard horse battery (that may need to go swimming in simple green?), as well as 2 guard foot batteries. The guns all worked out across the batteries but I'm not sure if some are from the original battle honours guns. I picked up all the howitzers later from Fighting 15's to complete the batteries.

   

This is how far I got with my Silesian landwehr cavalry before I hit the wall.

I'll get to them at some point . . .

I would like to add I am not being critical of whoever painted the figures originally. Everyone does their troops to the standard they are happy with and what they can manage with their budget and time and that's cool with me. I knew what I was getting and was very happy with what I got for the price they sold them to me at as it was below the unpainted cost of AB figures and I very much appreciate that!

Anyways I'm not sure when my next unit will be finished as I will need to learn to walk again now and hopefully soonwill  be back to work.

Happy wargaming!