French Line Infantry - Perry 28mm

Friday backlog post number two, is another 144 French Line Infantry. These are four boxes of the Perry's new(ish) 1807-14 French Infantry. I much prefer these to their 1815 set, as they are all in dress uniform rather than having a smattering of dreary looking greatcoats! Also I think the quality is better, for example more options with the officers.

This is a great set. I also painted up the skirmishers in these sets as Tirailleurs previously, as I already had enough skirmishers for my needs.

These are done with one company per base, with Grenadiers in bearskins, and Voltigeurs long plumed shakos.

With four boxes that is enough to detach flank companies and make a unit each of combined Voltigeurs and Grenadiers. This is my usual approach now of doing these in four units of 36, which can become six units of 24 for games where this is the standard size.

Tempted to get another four boxes for Neapolitans! We will see...
Thanks all, and more from the backlog will be posted next Friday.

French Chasseurs - Perry 28mm

I have quite a backlog of units painted over the last year, so spent a few hours last weekend taking photos and uploading them. I'll post new units every Friday or Saturday, once I've written something explaining what they are, and should have the backlog cleared after three months or so! So stay tuned if you want to see a range of French Empire and Austrian units, including some more unusual pieces amongst them.

I'll start things off though, with more of my favourite Napoleonic unit (hence title of this blog!). Here are two new French Chasseur units, looking very pretty wearing more of a dress rather than campaign uniform. These are from the new(ish), plastic box set from Perry, which is superb with many different options available. 

I've done these as the 7th  and 13th regiments. Here's some pics of the 13th in their orange facings.  

And the 7th with pink facings.

Another excellent Perry kit which also comes with a full colour complete painting and modelling guide for French Chasseurs. Note you get 14 cavalry in each kit, though I've only done up 12 per unit which is my standard number for cavalry. You can also see the Perry metal Chasseurs in campaign uniform, which I painted up over ten years ago now, in this previous post.   The plastic Chasseur kit comes with option to do campaign or full dress uniform and uniform features spanning from early to late Napoleonic period.

French Napoleonic Supply Wagons - Perry 28mm

Long on my to do list, I finally completed a couple of these very nice Perry supply wagons.  In addition to being nice scenery pieces, they are very useful for objectives in scenarios, such as many in Michael Hopper's scenario books.  And of course some rulesets also have rules for them, e.g. as markers of reformation areas.

And a You Tube video of them also.

The canopies and the main body of the wagon are now cast in resin, with the axles, wheels and yoke, horses and crew in metal. Each has a Driver and Cantinière as crew.  

I wasn't sure what colour to do the horse furniture, as my other French Napoleonic wagons have much of it in white, but the wagons are shown with black on the Perry site so that is what I went with. I imagine such details varied a great deal in any case over the course of time. A detail I really like on these is that the metal traces on the yolk actually match up with the harness on the horses, rather than having to make this rope detail yourself.

Here's a series of pics from different angles.

The canopies are optional, and sit in place nicely without gluing so I have left them removable.  The wagons are otherwise filled with a range of chests and tarpaulins. and a greatcoat slung over the rear chest. So they were not identical looking, I instead did some extra tarpaulins on the bottom one in pic below, out of green stuff.  Not the finest work in existence but passable. These together with the canopies I painted in a yellowed linen colour.

One other detail with these kits, is that they came with an extra piece (circled), that is just a duplicate of the bit now included in  the resin sculpt on the underside of the wagon. Previously when the wagon was metal rather than resin you had to glue it on. So you don't actually need this piece which caused me some confusion until people on the The Napoleonic Wargamer Facebook group pointed this out, thanks again!