3rd Battalion, 4th Silesian Landwehr Regiment Drummer

I finished off my 3rd Battalion drummer last night, which means his Dullcote is finally dry. So he’s finally ready for photographing!

I have to admit that I’d been putting him off for some time. In all my years of painting I’d never painted a drummer before and was agonizing strategizing over the best way to paint him up. Like my officers and NCOs, I went the extra step and gave him a bit of highlighting on the coat and trousers. Figured that eyes are going to be drawn to him so I might as well go the extra mile.

He also ties the battalion together quite nicely!

So with that, the 3rd Battalion of the 4th Silesian Landwehr Regiment is done! It only took about 2.5 years is all. 

Now moving on to the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 14th Silesian! My goal is to have at least one of them done before the shutdown ends and I go off to my wedding and honeymoon (which is 1.5 weeks away...ack!!).

"My sword, I say!"

Another Prussian Landwehr update! Just when I think I'm finally done with the 3rd Battalion, I notice something that I need to go back and fix. It's happened like three times in the past few weeks and will probably happen again. 

When I started painting my Landwehr back in 2016, I decided to give them black crossbelts. On this particular figure, I noticed something the other night. One belt attaches to the cartridge box on his right side. And the other?

There's nothing for his second belt to attach to. 

I went to my display case and double checked 3rd Battalion: I had eight versions of this figure without anything on the belt. Now, the figure sprues included a few swords, but sadly most of them have gotten mixed up and lost over the years. What ones I did have unfortunately kept breaking apart when I was cleaning them up with my X-acto knife.

So I sat and thought. 

I remembered that I have a ton of unused Early French Line Infantry sprues from Warlord! These came with the Polish Vistula Legion sets, but since I only needed the metal heads (another project that I'll get to someday) I therefore have plenty of extra bits. As you can see below, the grenadier and voltigeur knapsacks have swords suspended off of them. This was perfect because the Landwehr used a ton of French gear in 1813 due to supply shortages. Perfect! So I decided to go for it.

So I carefully clipped the swords off, which really wasn't tough at all.

Then I primed the swords in black gesso as is my style. I didn't want to glue them onto the figures first and then prime because I didn't want to run the risk of ruining their existing paint jobs.

Once the gesso was dry, the swords were painted accordingly (yet to be added here is the brass paint for the hilts and tips).

Actually gluing the swords onto the figures was nerve-wracking. I had to be extra careful on this step....otherwise I'd run the risk of ruining a perfectly good figure. Thankfully everything worked out just fine! Once the glue was dry, I did some touch ups and applied a black wash over the swords.  

Yes, I know the sword knots are sticking out at a slightly weird angle...but I'm telling myself that it's due to the momentum from marching. I'm actually really happy with this and surprised that this worked as well as it did! It adds a bit of variety and represents the common practice of using captured French equipment. I'm definitely going to repeat this on subsequent battalions. 

Thanks for reading! See you next time!

Turning those Shutdown Blues into Prussian Blues

Hi everyone!

Just a brief update. As some of you know, I work for the National Park Service as a Park Ranger. Because of the government shutdown, however, I’m unable to report to work. But now that the holidays are over I’ve been able to sit down and work on some figures this evening.

These are the newer Prussian Landwehr figures that Warlord put out last year (I think). I was excited that shakos were included in the set, so I put these guys in them because. Just worked on some basic block painting tonight which will be followed by shading tomorrow. Then it’s on to the second half of this battalion!