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Just a little painting a day. . .

So, the facings are now finished. Tonight, red breeches and, probably, the dark blue dry-brushing on the horses will follow. If time, I'll also quickly paint in the white wig on Colonel von Heide and the brown hair on the other two figures.


Keeps the mountain of lead and plastic at bay. Or something like that. Following our trip up to IKEA yesterday, we returned home yesterday evening and each enjoyed a few hours of personal time before settling in together, to watch Tootsie (1982) with Dustin Hoffman. Amazingly, I had never seen this particular movie before, and it was extremely funny. Dustin Hoffman truly is an amazing actor.

Anyway, I managed a bit more work on Colonel Heinrich von Heide and his regimental staff last night before movie time. First, the by-now-familiar tan undercoat, followed by white. The red facing color on the cuffs and skirt turnbacks followed. Not really much to look at just yet, but, to my eyes at least, the figures already appear much better than just a few days ago when they were a uniform black.

I've decided to paint the trumpeter in the same uniform as the rest of the men in Von Heide's Cuirassiers for the sake of speed. However, I will probably try to give him sleeve chevrons much later in the painting game, to offset him just a bit from all the rest of the unit. It is an imaginary unit after all, so I can take considerable leeway with the uniform color scheme and not worry too much about the historical veracity of things.

On that note, I initally toyed with the idea of dark green facings for the regiment. Dark green was apparently adopted as a facing color by a couple of Austrian cuirassier regiments in 1765, according to my Men-at-Arms volumn on the subject by Philip Haythornthwaite. In the end though, I decided that red on white is a more striking color combination. So, I opted for that color instead. Cuirassiers are, after all, as deserving of colorful, eye-catching uniforms as the hussars, don't you think?

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