All thawed out

At last, all the snow that’s hit Wiltshire over the last week or two has melted away at the study here at BfK HQ is warm enough to work in again. And that means it’s been time to start my assault on some of Peter F’s finest figures with the putty and sculpting tools. So far I’ve picked out some figures that look well-suited to modifications and made a list of the painful indignities I’m going to inflict on them. Better still, a couple have already been on the operating table. Once I’ve got a critical mass of work completed, I’ll take some snaps and share more details with you.

While I’ve been shivering lately, I’ve also hoovered up links to a few more interesting and useful sites.

The first of these is Clarence Harrison’s new blog where he plans to recount the tale of building his collection of figures for playing the Republic to Empire ruleset. Clarence did the artwork and design layout for the rulebook so if anybody’s collection is worth watching grow, it’ll be his.

Next up is another painting blog, this time that belonging to Toby Thornton who paints for Artmaster Studio. Now that’s a commercial painting service so I have to quickly clarify that this isn’t a product endorsement slot. Rather, I like the cut of Toby’s painting jib and if you scroll down a few postings you’ll find some Foundry French artillery figures that he’s done very nicely. The only thing I’ve found a bit odd is his choice of the Foundry figures. If he can do such a good job, I wonder why he didn’t opt for more modern sculpts from the Perrys. Still, there’s a little nostalgia there for me because some of those French artillery crew figures were among the first I purchased when I returned to the hobby about ten years ago.

Lastly, we travel to Spain for another commercial painter with a wide range of tastes in different periods and scales. “Archiduque” Rafa is another painter who works commercially and looking at his work I can see a definite Spanish school emerging with notable stylistic similarities to my online friend Javi Gomez.

All three sites are well worth a browse for eye-candy and painting inspiriation and I’ll add them to the links in the right hand column when I get a spare moment or three. And talking of having time to post more – I’ve just acquired a copy of a secondhand book I’ve been hunting down for ages. It’s the Arms and Armour Press version of the Blandford title Uniforms of the Retreat from Moscow. Over the weekend I’ll aim to say more about this acquisition and, in particular, why I prize this paperback edition more highly than the original Blandford hardback.

And I’ll leave you tonight with a stop press announcement from Alan Perry, in case you haven’t seen it yet.

Too busy to post

The surviving Ordinarfahne of the von Niesemeuschel regiment

Most of October seems to have slipped by since the last time I posted anything new. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy and it certainly doesn’t mean that the rest of the world has been idle either.

Barry and Clarence, as you may have noticed from a recent comment here on BfK, are now on the very cusp of publishing the Republic to Empire rules. Apparently the proofs are back from the printers, the presses are rolling and pre-orders will be available within a week.

Also, I seem to be in a modicum of demand. Rosemary of Rosemary and Co. has been in contact with me and we’ve had a very civilized correspondence. I’ve heard from several other painters that Rosemary makes excellent brushes at VFM prices so it was a pleasure to hear from her directly. I now have several review samples of her Kolinsky sable brushes that I’m going to try out over the coming weeks and review here.

So just what have I been up to? Well, mostly, I’ve been digging into the arcane mysteries of 1813 Saxon line infantry flags. You may recall that, in my review of the GMB 1811 Saxon flags, I mentioned that the history of what happened to these flags in the 1812 campaign and how the lost ones were replaced in 1813 was very complex. Well, it certainly was! But I think that a joint effort by Grahame Black, Peter F, me and a couple of our correspondents (thanks to Andrew Brentnall and von Winterfeldt) means that we’ve almost got to the bottom of it. And I know (again from another comment here at BfK) that Grahame has almost got the 1813 sets ready for release. So expect to see those reviewed here in the near future too. At that point, I might also share the results of our research and add it to the Saxon Army Resources page. But in the meantime, as a taster, the photo at the top of this post is of one of the flags that survives to this day.

New Republic to Empire preview

Republic to Empire

I’m back from my holidays and delighted to find that Barry and Clarence have released a 12-page 10Mb PDF preview of the Republic to Empire rules. Current expectation is that the finished version will be available in the Autumn.

This is just a quick interim post to bring you the news – I haven’t even read the PDF yet. I’ll add more here once I’ve had a chance to digest it!

More Republic to Empire clues

Just a quick post to say that Barry’s made a second teaser PDF available for free download. This one covers the thorny topic of scales: time, ground (horizontal) and vertical as well as figure ratios. Of course, the natural corollory of talking about scales is to talk about basing sizes and weapons ranges. And Barry doesn’t shirk from giving his fully thought out musings on these topics. There’s also some brief guidance on using the rules for figure scales other than 28mm.

I haven’t had time to do any more than skim through this document tonight but hopefully I’ll be able to read it in more detail and fully digest over the next few days. If I manage that, I’ll post a few more thoughtful observations here.