Holger Eriksson Cannon Near Completion. . .

Here's the next BIG battalion project, all lined up, ready for their temporary bases, and base-coat. 60+ Prussian infantry by Huzzah Miniatures in the United Kingdom.

Not much time for painting this past weekend. My amateur band, The Indras, had a booking on Saturday evening, and we burned down the house with our Hamburg-era Beatles mix of 1950s rock & roll, rockabilly, and R&B. We were actually cheered, and the bar owner rebooked us on the spot. Exciting stuff to say the least, but the Holger Eriksson cannon, which will go with the Garrison crew that I painted recently, are not quite done yet. Hopefully in the next day or two.

In any case, I spent about 20-30 minutes yesterday evening after dinner, fishing out and organizing the next part of the Grand Duchy of Stollen project. As threatened, this will be 60+ Prussian infantry by Ian Marsh, which he sells under the Huzzah! name. These are marketed as "old school", 30mm miniatures, and indeed, they are reminiscent of the classic Spencer Smith marching musketeer. However, the Huzzah castings are finer with much better detail. See for yourself in the photograph at the top of this blog entry. This is a nice range, though incomplete as of yet. Ian has priced his figures competitively as I mentioned in a previous post. I hope it is finished with time and manages to to take off in the wargaming world. It wouldn't take much coaxing to get me to purchase another unit or two of these! ;-)

So, "What uniform," you might ask, "will you paint them in, Stokes?" Well, in the interest of time and speeding up the painting process, I am leaning toward something inspired, at least, by the SYW-era Prussian garrison regiments -- a uniform dark blue -- with possibly white or light tan waistcoats/vests and red or light blue cuffs just to add some visual interest. Jim "Alte Fritz" Purky displayed some RSM figures that he painted in this type of uniform a year or two ago on his Hesse-Seewald blog, and they look very nice even without all of the usual fancy trim. So, mine too will be very plain figures, though I will give them some kind of fancy, brightly colored flag, to march behind.

Incidentally, for last night's photograph, I've lined the regiment up in a formation similar to that of the Erbprinz Regiment in Peter Young's and James Lawford's Charge! Or How to Play War Games. This is something Phil Olley did recently over at his Classic Wargaming blog with his version of that fabled wargaming unit, and it only seemd right and just to do something similar here, albeit with unpainted metal at this point. It's very much a case of monkey see, monkey do here at Stollen Central! ;-)

Finally, I've added a couple of more new buildings to the latest batch, including a rather nice warehouse and a fancy gabled, two-part church that might also double as a guild hall, a town hall, or some other kind of official building. I'll include a photo or two of these in a later post. One of you Stollen regulars was kind enough to ask about the materials I use to "construct" my tabletop real estate in the last day or so. That's easy! Nothing more than heavy cardboard saved from the back of writing tablets, some balsa wood, white glue, a metal ruler, and a sharp X-acto knife/modelling scalpel. All you need are some inspiring photographs of the kinds of old buildings you want to model, and then cut out and assemble a slightly simplified version thereof that will withstand the rigors of tabletop campaigns better than a minutely detailed model might. I explained how I prefer to do this in a series of posts, written back in January 2008, for anyone who might want to read about it in a more detailed way. Until later then, "Charrrrrrrge!!!"