Over the past couple of months, I have been working through the mountain of French Line and Guard infantry and artillery. The figires are a mix of Airfix, HaT, Revell, ESCI and Italeri.
First off, we have the line infantry, with 11 battalions and three batteries of guns:
Yesterday I finished off the last of the Austrians, completing 10 infantry units, 4 of artillery and 3 cavalry. This all makes up to a nice army that can be organised into two divisions. I also uncovered a large amount of unpainted Austian that will no doubt have their time on the painting table in the future.
Here is the Austrian Army:
Next will be a few more British and then I will look at the Prussian army.
Some more figures have been tidied up and rebased:
Airfix British line infantry:
Over the decades our family has accumulated a huge collection of plastic Napoleonic figures. They have been painted.organised and reorganised and repainted many times. The result of all this is that they have been dispersed and set aside as new projects took hold, or they were replaced by metal castings.
As a result of a mistaken purchase, I have decided to centralise all of the figures, repair and repaint where necessary and to use standard basing. The mistake occurred when I was looking for some plastic French cavalry to go with my Les Higgins collection, until such time as I could find some metal originals. I put in a bid for some French Hussars and a few Riflemen that were going cheap on eBay. I forgot about the bid until just before the auction closed and I thought, as I was the only bidder, I should take a look in more detail. To my horror I could see why there were few bids, it was collection only. Luck was on my side, however, as the location of the lot was about 5 miles down the road, phew!
I then looked at the description and realised that it was not just some cavalry and infantry, but a complete collection of over 1,500 figures. My bid of around £20 looked too low but I remained the only bidder and won the collection, which is now sitting in my garage. I am guessing that most other people failed to fully read the description and were put off by the 'collection only' condition.
To cut a long story short I now have an additional massive collection of painted plastic figures and it made sense to merge these with our existing holdings. As most were sitting dormant in attics and cupboards, the rest of the family were glad to shed their figures, no doubt grateful for the additional storage space.
So, there we are. This little adventure has seen me painting and basing hundreds of figures and I thought I would share some pictires as I complete them. First off figures from our original collection, repainted and baed. Starting with some British:
Some Airfix Highlanders:
