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.

Great article on Chasseurs

I'm a fan of the under rated Chasseurs - hardly surprising given the name of my blog, and what I said in a previous post on my own Chasseurs!

Thus I'm pleased to see that Warlord Games have released a box of plastic Chasseurs. Though already having three units myself I'm not sure I need any more right now!

Just as interestingly, they also have a great article on the Chasseurs, so do check it out! It has a lot of good information.

Here's the new Warlord Chasseurs box set, looking very nice!

French Chasseurs a Cheval 28mm Perry

Three regiments of Chasseur a Cheval for post number three. I'm quite fond of Chasseurs (as you may have guessed given the name of this blog!), so I painted up a good number. They're often overlooked in favour of prettier and more powerful troops by wargamers, but the humble Chasseurs were the most common subtype of French cavalry for much of the Napoleonic wars. Needless to say "humble" is the description others gave to them - the Chasseurs thought themselves equal to Hussars and I understand that quarrels between these two types of light cavalry were not uncommon. Napoleon created many regiments of Chasseurs because the less elaborate uniforms and smaller horses were comparatively inexpensive. They were used for scouting as well as for battle.

These are metal Perry miniatures. Not as much a fan of these as the Perry plastics, and arguably Chasseurs should have been one of the first plastic sets given what I just said about how common they were historically! Hard to get as much variety in pose with metals, and I've done nothing more than a few head turns. Also while painting I kept finding little bits of flash I had missed when cleaning up, so I will be more careful with cleanup on my next metal unit from Perry. Nonetheless they turned out ok I think. The castings are nice and still have some variety.  Horses and riders are slightly smaller than the Perry heavy cavalry which is excellent and appropriate. 

I chose the 16th (sky blue facings), 19th (aurore yellow facings), and  25th (madder red facings). I gave the officers matching coloured breeches to brighten them up a bit and so they won't feel so envious of the Hussars... Here's a useful link with facing colours of the various Chasseur a Cheval regiments:

http://www.histomin.com/wppaintguide/paintguidenap/pgchasseursfr.htm

The 25th.

The 16th.

The 19th.

All three regiments.