Renovating Ancients

For some time now I have been toying with the idea of renovating my collection of ancient figures. This coincided with a few acquistions to build up sufficient figures to have a go at Command and Colors Ancients.  Most of the figures are basically painted, although a number have broken parts that need to be repaired.  They are a mix of Minifigs, Garrison and a few Hinchliffe and are Greeks and Persians.  Here is part of the collection:

Those in the glass bowls are being soaked to remove old bases and flock.

The Garrison figures are the most challenging, having suffered lots of breakages:

I have made a start on some figures and will publish some pictures of the results.

Warrior - Prussian Dragoons

I bought these figures on Ebay and I have repainted them. I now have two dragoon regiments, a Cuirassier and a hussar regiment. I have also painted some test infantry figures, which look quite good:

Austrian Cuirassiers - 25mm Minifigs S range

I have been working on these figures for several weeks and over the weekend I finally finished them.  These are Austrian Napoleonic Cuirassiers, with some clever conversions to create command figures, kindly carried out by a friend.

I enjoyed painting these, although I am not sure that I have done them justice and I might go back and tidy up one or two aspects:

Hichliffe WW2 British Infantry 20mm

The refurbishment of the first lot of my Hinchliffe 20mm British is now complete.  I am also replacing some of the plastic figures with Hinchliffe originals too:

Basic Memoir '44 units:

A Vickers MG unit:

Command figures, forward observer team, flame thrower etc:

Hinchliffe WW2 Russians

The second very kind gift was of a quantity of Hinchliffe 20mm Russian infantry and gunners.  There are sufficient figures to make up a useful force with support weapons.

The infantry come in three basic poses - an officer, an infantry man with a sub-machine gun and a rifleman:

Here is the whole infantry force:

In addition the batch of figures contained enough crews to man four support weapons. First off, I used three to man a mortar:

Two further crews were used to man a couple of 76mm guns by Irregular Miniatures:

The last crew were used to man a seriously large anti-tank gun, again by Irregular Miniatures:

Finally, I also finished this German Pak 40 by Hinchliffe, with a crew:

Hinchliffe WW2 20mm Figures

In the 1970s my brothers and I purchased a few of the then emerging range of Hinchliffe WW2 figures and they have been sitting in drawers for decades. Recently with my introduction to Memoir '44 I have started using these figures, as seen in the recently played out Pegasus Bridge scenario.

The discussion following Pegasus bridge led to some very kind gifts of Hinchliffe Russians and Germans from fellow bloggers. This has allowed me to expand my collection, and of course given me the opportunity to paint some different figures.

Here are some samples of German infantry, notably some support weapons and a few infantry:

An Mg 42 team and an 8cm mortar with crew:

Anti-tank teams:

German infantry:

German elite troops:

I have already painted a number of British infantry and I am near to completion of a large group of Russians. More pictures to follow.

Iroquois War Party - SYW

Within the batch of SYW figures that I obtained from the Eric Knowles collection was this small group of Iroquois indians by Minifigs. One figure, the pointing chap, is a Minifigs S Range item.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable project as I had not painted any 25mm native indians before and certainly not in my toy soldier gloss style.  I experimented with shades of buff and brown to create the skin tones and the various buckskin clothes and equipment, Here is the result: