Fantasy female - The Huntress

Oh well, I thought my next blog was going to showcase my first really big battalion for the Waterloo project, but 138 figures is taking longer than I expected, and just to keep my readers interested I thought I'd show you a painting I did back in the Summer.

OK, she's not "military", but she does have weapons, so that's my excuse

Here is "The Huntress - Powerful yet Vulnerable"

During one of our photoshoots, when the Hussarette garb had hit the floor, my model sportingly took up some poses in her thong with the carbine and sabre.  Reviewing them later this one struck me as ideal for the kind of classic fantasy female made popular by the likes of Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell. Another famous artist of this genre is Frank Frazetta, and his Tarzan comic book paintings often had eery jungle with tangled draping foliage.  While in no position to think I can match these great artists it wouldn't stop me having  a go. So I substituted the carbine for a powerful looking bow, added a quiver of arrows and a large hunting knife, played around with the thong and bra to give them a bit more substance, and invented some henna style tattoos for an additional sense of the mysterious.

Looking back through my photo reference library I came across some scenes from Gloucestershire's very own Puzzle Wood in the nearby Forest of Dean, which already had that quality of moss covered rocks and clinging dark foliage. Just changing the perspective a little gave me a good setting for my Huntress to be crouching, examining tracks of her prey, some kind of bear is what I had in mind, then hearing a threatening sound in the woods and looking sideways, warily.

I hope I've created the mood for the viewer of a woman very much in charge, and confident, yet in this environment she is still vulnerable to some hidden being or force.......

Female viewers might say "I'd feel vulnerable dressed like that wherever......." :-)

Fans of Legatus and his wargames ladies might think she could be at home with Professor Challenger, helping to populate his Lost World

Unlike all my Hussarettes this lady doesn't have a name, so readers are invited to give polite suggestions

The painting is oil on gessoed, stretched canvas and is 20" x 16" . I stuck to a colour harmony using only 

Cadmium Yellow hue

Naples Yellow

Cadmium red hue

Viridian

Burnt Umber

Prussian Blue

Titanium white

The Huntress is for sale, at a mere £95. If you are interested, or fancy commissioning something in the same vein please contact me by email Chris Gregg or if you are not familiar with my other work you can see many of them on my website and its links (though it needs updating with more work since the Summer) Chris Gregg military art page

Waterloo Project: In search of the 95th Rifles

This is my first follow up to the original posting on our Waterloo project
As you'll have read in that I jumped in with both feet to provide about 1000 figures representing something like half our requirement for the actions around La Haye Sainte on 18th June 1815.  I recalled the jargon of my Civil Service days when someone came up with a wonderful new project and needed a "quick win" to impress management. What could I have as my "quick win" to get this task on the road?

Around the famous sandpit and the "elm tree crossroads" the 1st Battalion of the 95th Rifles was deployed. We reckoned we needed about 160 figures at 1:3 figure : man ratio to give a good representation. Luckily Paul and Kevin had around 80 of these in their existing collections so I just needed to provide another 80 and I reasoned that 95th Rifles, being so popular, would be easy to find.

Alban Riflemen come in packs of either Firing or Moving

Well, a quick check of Ebay found some for auction, along with other things I needed.and, as I managed to win various small batches I asked the sellers if they had any Rifles for sale. Within the broad spectrum of "28mm" I'm not too fussy, and in this case I dropped my usual prejudice against buying painted figures as the overall project seemed so large I could justify slightly lesser quality paintwork. Before long I'd gathered a nice little collection of over 80, about 40 of which only need touching up and putting on landscaped bases and varnishing.

I learned, along the way, buying second hand, that there is a surprising variety of manufacturers producing Riflemen as either the 95th or 60th. Most of them I couldn't identify but just accepted at face value. One lot of 12 was identified as by Alban Miniatures, which was a new company to me. I won them and so was committed to buying some more to make up the required company strength.  So, one of the purposes of this posting is to bring Alban Miniatures to the attention of any Napoleonic enthusiasts unfamilar with them and looking for something a bit different in character.

You can also get a neat command pack of four figures.
 This officer is blowing a whistle, not dragging on a fag!

I'll let you explore the Alban website from the link above but they offer a nice selection of British, French and Austrian figures at somewhat expensive prices to my mind, but it depends what you like. Why these are different is because they are designed by Richard Ansell of Minden and Fife and Drum Miniatures fame. That means they are 28mm, but slim and elegant, and not easily blended in with the more usual brands like Perry, Victrix or Front Rank. Hence I have one company only of them in my 1st Battalion.

Here you can see the regimental number decals for the back packs and water canteens. The light blue spot on the base is to help players identify the separate companies as they won't be familiar with my esoteric approach to figure matching in units

A nice bonus I thought is that Alban offer a small sheet of decals of of "95" or "60" back pack labels and also very authentic looking water canteen unit markers. While I might do be able to paint the pack backs numbers I certainly can't paint in this detail on canteens, so they give a touch of class to what are already pretty classy figures. I hope you like my small sample presented here.

Close up the decal of  the Board of Ordnance regulation issue canteen  marking

Below is a picture of some of the rest of my 95th. The company in front are all makes unknown to me, the one behind is mostly Perry metal and plastic. But I draw your attention to the officers at the nearest ends. The one on the right must, I feel sure, be Richard Sharpe in view of the big heavy cavalry sword, which featured in the novels and is of course a long way from the shorter curved sabre of Rifle officers. The officer at the back is a diminutive figure, also with a big sword and I believe he is also intended to be "Sharpe" as he came along with a Sergeant of the same small size bearing a "volley gun" made famous by Sgt Patrick Harper's character in the TV series. I had to mount these two on artificially high sections of base so they would blend, at a distance with their larger colleagues. Whether these little chaps, which remind me of Parkfield Miniatures, will actually make it onto my field of Waterloo in 2015 remains to be seen. 

Here is a view of all three companies, about 60-70 figures, and I've since added more to bring them to 82 .

From the front - unknown makes, then a line of mostly Perry's and in the distance my company of Alban's. These photographs are taken on a prototype terrain tile I made to experiment with different ways of producing "trampled wheatfields" for that muddy day on Mont St Jean.

Assuming I finish them soon my next post on the Waterloo project will be about the 2nd Light Battalion King's German Legion.

Hougoumont model leads to big project

My friend Kevin East has big ideas, and the artistic talent to match, but modestly doesn't shout about his achievements much. Little did I realise when he came back into my life last year that I would be sucked into a wargaming project that brings me right back to the start of my wargaming life nearly 50 years ago.

Something to aspire to - a beautiful model of
The Chateau of Hougoumont

1965 was the 150th anniversary of Waterloo and to mark the occasion the recently departed great Don Featherstone put on a public display in London using the 20mm troops and sculpted terrain of Peter Gilder. Other notables of the day such as Neville Dickenson and Tony Bath refought the famous battle with, I suppose, about 2000 model soldiers on what was for those days a huge table.  I went with my friend Chris Beaumont and we 13 year olds were quite overcome by the occasion. I put that event down as the time I became a proper wargamer because we saw the real chaps in action and realised how a wargame was fought in practice rather than trying to puzzle it out from Don's book.
Tony Bath as Napoleon in 1965
Close up of the 1965 style Waterloo terrain in 1970
 I bought my first bags of Spencer Smith 30mm plastic Napoleonic figures....and the rest is history.

I later converted to doing Napoleonics in 20mm, and about 6 or 7 years after that, when they were "state of the art", collected 15mm armies.  About 15 years or so after that, inpired by a lecture by sculptor Anthony Barton, I made a passable collection of my own design of 15mm French and Spanish Peninsular figures. Many other periods and scales have been and gone and I eventually off loaded my 15mm Napoleonic armies about 3 years ago but have never lost my "love" and awe for the Napoleonic period for wargaming.

In 2010 at a 28mm Napoloeonic game he'd put on for our group my friend Paul casually said "You know, I've never refought the Battle of Waterloo", and I replied, "Well. despite all my involvement in the period, neither have I ". Paul added, "I'd really like to do it in 2015, for the 200th anniversary". There were murmurs of approval round the table but misgivings that we didn't have a venue big enough to do it justice. My response was "anyway, I'd love to do the terrain", and we left it at that........

....Until 2013.....

At this stage if you haven't seen them already have a digression to look at the three Kevin East Guest Pages in my right hand side bar.   Kevin has been building up specific Waterloo units in 28mm at a scale of 1 figure = 20 men and they are staggeringly beautifully done, but he says he is primarily a collector, with wargaming a secondary interest, and had no pre-conceived ideas about what games he would  do with them. Thus he'd quietly painted for about 5 years until coming back in contact with the Cheltenham Greatfield Group via me.

Now Paul has been the mainstay of our Napoleonic grand-tactical-scale gaming for more years than I care to remember, first in 6mm, then 15mm, and latterly in 28mm as his eyesight succombed to the inevitable ageing process. He has developed a very workable set of Napoleonic rules for multi-corps battles at one figure = 100 men. So the whole of Waterloo would need about 2000 figures.

Action hots up in Paul's recent refight of the second day of the
Battle of Eckmuhl 1809 (yes I know we are not very tidy!)

So it seemed sensible to put Paul and Kevin together to pool resources for Waterloo and we had our first meeting to discuss this project in August, knowing that we'd still need a long time to get it right.

By late Spring 2014 I expect to move into my own wargames room-cum-art studio because the builders start work on our new house in about a month or so. By 2015 we should have knocked this into shape for regular gaming and I hope to have enough room for a specially designed Waterloo set up 13 feet long by 6 feet wide, and with another 12 square feet added on to give extra depth. So that's the first madness - I've volunteered to make 90 square feet of customised terrain at a scale of 1 inch = 50 yard!  Kevin and Paul seem confident they can provide all the troops for this at 1:100.

But it gets madder....and that brings me to Hougoumont.

Kevin had acquired the neally nice Chateau and also La Haye Sainte models made by Hovels in a scale for 25/28mm figures, but as I've said, had no real idea of gaming with them until Paul and I saw them and exclaimed how could we resist not using them!  But a model as big as Hougoumont needs a skirmish level wargaming scale, and after a lot of thinking we settled on one figure = 3 real men and 1 inch = 3 metres on a 12 foot x 6 foot table with a couple of add-on pieces.   And before I knew it I was into a second mad decision - to make two more base boards for the Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte (LHS) scenarios, and rules to match.

But more madness was to follow..........

I hadn't thought this through properly.  In the excitement of the meeting I volunteered to organise and umpire the LHS scenario, thinking the other guys would take care of the figures within their already scoped games. It was only in the cold light of dawn, after my euphoria-addled head came up for air out of Mark Adkin's "Waterloo Companion", that I realised the LHS area was fought over by several battalions of green-clad King's German Legion Light Infantry and Hanoverians, and we had very few of those!  So, if I didn't do them we'd have no game. Just for added fun we'd have to recreate the various escapades up onto Mont St. Jean of French Cuirassiers and Dragoons, the 2nd Life Guards, the RHA Rocket Troop and the KGL Light Dragoons across this area of the famous field and through various times of the day. Also we'd need the French 13th Legere trying to take LHS itself. Each battalion will be between 140 and 200 figures.

And so it was that I found I'd volunteered to paint nearly 1000 28mm figures in the next 21 months! That's nearly 50 a month, or 1.5 a day. Sounds easy when  you put it like that but I do have a life, and work, and a family, and a house to renovate, and the terrain to make, and other wargame periods I had hoped to pursue (did you read my Stalingrad posts?).

It look like we will be scheduling  four weekends during our "Waterloo Summer 2015". Two different variations of the whole battle, a weekend of LHS scenarios, and a weekend of Hougoumont scenarios. Although many of the figures will be re-used I think we will be getting through about 4000 figures in those weekends, so it is no small undertaking for a tiny group like ours (yes we do have a couple more volunteers so far - thanks - you know who you are).

But, the good thing is that I've just received medical advice that I'm over the worst hurdle on my recovery from cancer.......I can expect to stay well enough to see this through. But if I'd had a "bucket list" who could imagine a Napoleonic wargamer not having Waterloo at the top? And if I do die in the attempt, what a glorious way to go......

I'm sure you will hear more about this, but for now I hand over to Kevin East. Please see the new Kevin East Hougoumont Guest page in the right hand side bar where he explains all about his lovely model and how he painted it, and there is an example of a 216 figure battalion too, of which we expect to have six or seven in play on each of our 1:3 scale weekends!