Dragooned into Shape

With things flowing well I decided to stick with the current 're-visiting' theme and reorganise my Hinchliffe ECW dragoon units, Wardlawe's[1] and Washington's[2].  For some time I have wanted more than one unit a side and felt that the number of mounted figures tied up in these units is wasteful.  When dismounted, I represent my dragoon units with three bases of figures, two forming a firing line and one representing the horse-holders, thus.

       Washington's    &       Wardlawe's          

When mounted they are each represented by twelve mounted figures.

    Wardlawe's      &     Washington's

As these units tend to spend most, if not all, of their time dismounted it seems wasteful to use so many mounted figures in this way, and use four bases as they only occupy three when dismounted.

The solution I came up with, was to reduce the mounted representation to just two bases of mounted figures but use them with same horse-holder base used with the two dismounted bases.  Furthermore, I decided I would have only one guidon per unit, and that would be with a mounted figure on the horse-holder base.  This would require some re-basing so into the paddling pool they went to soften up the PVA and sand basing.

This was watched, with some trepidation, by those elements of the units that did not require re-basing from the safety of a nearby window sill.

This all went pretty smoothly apart the need to replace the reins of the horses from Washington's horse-holder base as they broke when being de-based.   

So, here's the new-look Wardlawe's and Washington's, dismounted ...

   Wardlawe's     &    Washington's

... and mounted.

Wardlawe's     &    Washington's

I rather like the end-result.  The extra mounted figure on the horse-holder base makes the horses more prominent in the dismounted unit, and helps it blend in better as part of the unit when mounted.

Now, to complete each of the two new units that will use the surplus mounted figures, I have to paint: ten dismounted figures; a mounted ensign with guidon; a mounted dragoon, and a horse-holder with two horses.  Additionally, there will be some re-touching of the figures taken from the old units to give them different coat colours and their new regimental guidons.

The identities of the new units will be revealed in a future post.

Notes:

[1.]  A Parliamentarian regiment of dragoons of the Earl of Essex’s army under Col. James Wardlawe, later reduced to an independent troop, commanded by Capt. George Dundas', and later by Capt. Jeremiah Abercromby (source: wiki.bcw-project.org.uk).

[2.]  A Royalist regiment of dragoons, originally under Col. James Ussher, and later Sir Henry Washington; also known as Prince Maurice’s Regiment of Dragoons.  It fought as part of the Oxford Army, and at Marston Moor, then converted to a foot regiment in the garrison of Worcester (source: wiki.bcw-project.org.uk).

Last of the Rings

The speed with which I finished off the figures in my last post left me feeling up for more quick retouching.  To this end I dug out two lots of Warhammer Lord of the Rings (LotR) figures I'd been intending to re-touch for some time.

First, the 'Dead' that I bought painted off eBay (for less than the cost of the basic figures) but wanted the paint job modified from a 'stone grey' to an 'ethereal green' and the basing changed to match the other figures in my collection.  I did an earlier trial 'touch-up' in an earlier post (Link) so this was a fairly quick bit of dry-brushing and re-basing on this bunch of 21 figures.

En-masse they look good, but up close the basic nature of the paint-job is more apparent.

Second, I had a unit of 12 Rangers of Ithilien painted by Fernando Enterprises.

While I like the green used for their cloaks, it is the same as that used on all my Rohirrim figures and I wanted to differentiate them.  To this end I re-painted the cloaks in more muted colours, better suited for Rangers to blend into woods.

While they make a coherent looking unit, I did them in two groups of 6, one lot with paler 'greyer' cloaks as Rangers of the North (Dunedain) ...

... and one lot in darker green/brown cloaks as Rangers of Ithilien.

This gives me some flexibility with these figures as they could all be used as the same troop type / unit, but they can also separated into two smaller units that can be distinguished visually.

Apart from a few metal personality figures, this effectively completes my LotR collection ...  

...  for now?

More Legions of the White Hand

Saruman had taken a drubbing in recent games, and so I felt I needed to give him the sort of numerical advantage that he sought to overthrow Rohan.  To this end I rooted out all the odd spare figures I had laying around plus a few very cheap eBay lots and sent them off to get painted by Fernando Enterprises.  One of the eBay lots was a sprue of 12 Dunlendings (link) as these would add another troop type.

Well, they all came back from Sri Lanka while I was tarting up the Uruk Hai reported in the last post.  But I managed to quickly do the required minimal retouching and basing (texturing and painting) for them to join the Uruks from the previous post to make an imposing reinforcement for the Army of Orthanc.

Added to my existing units, they bring Saruman's forces up to:

 

103 Orcs (aka Goblins)

47 Uruk Hai

12 Dunlendings

8 Wargs (unridden)

7 Warg Riders

2 Trolls

The Orcs were painted by Fernando to match previous batches and required no touching up at all, except the tips of their spears were painted red so I redid these with  gunmetal (but that was dead easy and very quick).  The Dunlendings needed a little bit more, but nothing a quick spot of paint wouldn't fix.  On the subject of fixing I had to mend two of the Dunlendings' weapons.  I can't fault Fernando for this as the figures were superbly packaged, and any blame is down to Games Workshop for the incredibly spindly weapons on these figures.  Anyway, I was very pleased with the Dunlendings and they deserve their own photo to show off the brushwork.

Also included in the batch of figures were five odd Riders Rohan figures I put together from spare bits and broken figures.  These were painted by Fernando to match the previous batch they did for me.

These figures are a very good match to the earlier batch but did require a little bit more tidying up.  I think that's because these are less detailed sculpts than the Dunlendings, and Fernando's painters do better when there's a clear feature to paint rather than one that requires a bit of interpretation.  I added and hand-painted the flag myself based on a design I foud online.  I'm rather pleased with it, especially the horse, which is clearly influenced by the White Horse at Uffington.  Hiding in the back of the above photo is a spare horse I decided to use as a casualty marker, complete with embedded arrow (the latter also had broken off so was replaced by another provided by a friend at my local club).

These, combined with my existing figures, give me a total of 20 mounted Rohirrim, more than enough for a skirmish.

Caveat on Fernando painting: I also sent some small batches of Blue Moon Miniatures 15mm US Cavalry ...

... and Plains Indians with a view to starting a new project.  

I was not pleased with the photos sent back, and in the end, Fernando said they had done all they could to fulfil my requests for changes and returned the figures at no charge.  While it was very reasonable to not charge me for these figures, I was surprised that some of the changes, like painting the moccasins a brown leather colour rather than black was considered too technically challenging.  

It seems that 15mm castings might not be their strength, especially fairly rough castings like Blue Moon.  OTOH their handling of the Dunlendings suggest that 

any modern range of 28mm plastic figures will turn out rather well.