D’Erlon’s I Corps Shiny French Infantry

Scott MacPhee (MacPhee’s Miniature Men Blog) just finished painting the figures for the 4 Divisions of French Infantry for my shiny Napoleonic Armies project. They arrived just before Christmas, and I finished basing them.

My basing scheme is 6 figures per base, which represents a regiment. 4 regiments + a divisional command stand = a division.

Scott did such a great job with this toy soldier style paintjob, which is going to really ‘pop’ on the tabletop. I really love the bright colors and glossy finish (I gave them a second coat of gloss to really make them shine using Floquil Hi-Gloss).

Figures are current Minifigs; Flags are GMB.

Shiny Napoleonic Infantry

Here are my first Infantry units. These are all refreshes of long ago painted Minifigs miniatures. They all had been based and flocked for gaming and had to be carefully pried off their bases, somewhat cleaned up, touched up, and re-based. They retain the essential feel of their original paintjobs, which were quite nice.

 I’ve been experimenting with different unit compositions for my bases: 

My Infantry bases will have 6 foot figures (2 ranks of 3). The French Grenadier and British Foot bases are represented as a company of the same type, whereas the Nassau base is a battalion of 6 different companies. I think that this latter method makes more sense for me due to the scale of the battles that I want to fight (entire major battles rather than smaller engagements). It also looks rather fun and colorful with the various plumes, etc.

Shiny Napoleonic French Dragoons

After a crazy five year delay on this project, I’ve gotten back to my true 25mm vintage napoleonic miniatures.

I’ve been collecting painted and unpainted Minifigs, Del Prado, Connoisseur, and Hinchliffe figures. I’ve cleaned up, repaired, touched up, and rebased old painted figures from the 70’s and 80’s. It feels good to rescue these classics! Though I try to improve what needs help without changing the original artists work too much.

This set is the venerable Hinchliffe 25mm French Dragoons in Bardin 1812 - 1815 uniforms. (Note: The original painter designated them as the 9th Dragoons, which historically were converted to Line Lancers before the Bardin Regulations went into effect. So this unit never really looked like this…but I don’t mind.)

These figures were beautifully painted by the original owner, so I didn’t need to do much work on them. I refreshed the helmets with brighter bronze (actually used gold for this) to help them pop more on the table. I refreshed-painted the horsehair plumes and horse tails as the black had faded. I painted blankets red that had been left white. And I repaired a few spots where the paint had worn down to the metal. And then a fresh coat of gloss. 

All figures are Hinchliffe except the Eagle Bearer’s horse, which is Connoisseur. I’ve got flags ordered from GMB, which I’ll add soon.