Falling Standards?

The last two Hessian standards 'borrowed' into the Stollenaian Army.  They will take their place at the head of the very first line regiment (Revell 1/72 tall, thin plastic Prussians) completed way back in the late summer of 2006.  These Minden figures will stick out a little less sorely than the single, rather squat MiniFig first assigned to the regiment way back in '06.  The flags are also certainly more colorful than the original.

Well, despite the coffee catastrophe yesterday morning, and the trip out to replace the keyboard, I managed to have a fairly balanced day.  Balanced in terms of mostly hobby tinkering with rules and plowing through the remaining half dozen papers for one of my classes this semester yesterday afternoon.  Mercifully, the latter were pretty good to, in the case of two, excellent, so I was left with time for other things.  The Young Master even managed to prepare most of his science fair project on the Space Shuttle unsupervised.  Happy sigh.

All of that meant that I had about 90 minutes following The Young Master's evening routine, which lately also includes one or another of the Geronimo Stilton novels, the current favorite, for bedtime reading.  Once back down here in Zum Stollenkeller at about 8:35pm, I got to work on the flags picture above.  I had no orange handy, so flew by the seat of my pants and mixed my own using a GW/Citadel red, yellow, and then some white for highlighting plus a later blue and green for the central details around the Hessian lion.  

Not too bad if I might be permitted to say so.  As with the last pair of Hessian flags, I've painted over the areas of main color but will leave the detailed wreath and crown alone.  Simply too complicated for me to attempt, but by painting in the main colors and then adding a few highlight washes here and there, the style now matches my figure painting a bit better than if I had simply printed out the flags, attached them to the poles, and left them as is.  

Only a few minor touch-ups left to do, but I'm pleased with the 90 minutes' work overall.  I did mess up one blue corner ray on the flag at right, obliterating the smaller wreath and crown in a corner of the flag almost entirely, but is is just about made invisible by a furl near the flagpole, so I'm not going to mess with it any further.  C'est la guerre as they say!

The next step is to reexamine all of these replacement infantry standards and bearers for any final and necessary (??!!) touch-ups, and then slap two or three coats of Liquitex acrylic gloss over everything.  I can then attach the standard bearers themselves to those nifty replacement Litko bases onto which I stuck everything else last September to make the appearance of my armies a bit more consistent given the various figures used thus far and minor differences in size and sculpting style.  

From this point forward, however, anything that might be added to the existing combat forces will be either RSM95, Minden, Fife&Drum, Crann Tara, or Eureka, with, just maybe, another unit of Holger Eriksson dragoons at some point.  But that is putting the cart before the, ahem, horse.

Next up, I must add a few standard and guidon bearers to my existing cavalry regiments, and then I can return, in good conscience, to all of those unpainted cavalry castings purchased in the run up to and just after my half-century mark in the fall of 2016.  In the meantime, another dozen student papers this afternoon as well as some lesson planning for Monday morning's class.  Happy Sunday everyone!

-- Stokes