Nine Months of Painting

After a long time painting ... many nights indeed ... i have this many Frenchmen. It is a labour of love breathing life and colour into a early wargaming dream and it is paying off ... slowly. I very much like the results - cheers CGM miniatures - but will be pretty happy when i have three more battalions plus skirmishers done. Then it will be just my young guard brigade plus a lancer regiment plus one more marie louise foot battalion. Quite a bit left but nothing compared to when i started. Then onto Prussia.

Napoleonic 15mm CGM cavalry and others

Lets make this short. I love my new cavalry unit ... 4th Chasseurs a Cheval. They look great but will also be often used as chasseurs were increasingly common in french forces as 1813 wore on and later. I like representing the troops in the field not just the elites as wargamers often do. Therefore these guys will take the field most evenings supporting my forces - who are being increasingly modelled on Souham's division in Ney's III corps 1813. But i have a bit of painting to do if this becomes the case. The brigades were large.

New Recruits for Napoleon's 1813 campaign

My Napoleonic army is expanding albeit slowly.

This project has thus far been a focus for 8 almost 9 months and shows no sign of abating. This is after a relentless effort of months of solidly investing at least 2-3 hours per evening to the project. (I know that for this time I should have better results but this is about the best I can produce and I'm quite proud of the effect even though better is easily found on the interweb.)

In fact, as all good wargaming projects do, it has increasing in scope. I initially decided I would paint 9 infantry regiments (of 32 miniatures each - a number that I have always found daunting ... how I was lead to this number is another story and no entirely in my hands.) Then i decided I would have at least 11. Now mostly I'm thinking 15 or possibly 17 as I desire now to represent two 1813 brigades and a brigade of Young Guard and with cavalry support.

The battles of Bautzen, Lutzen and Leipzig are firmly in my mind especially the division then corps led by Souham whose troops were embroiled in the thick of the fighting in each instance of battle. On the good side I have finished the heavy cavalry arm of the army. This I envisaged as the armoured fist of the army - cuirassiers - as I have no desire to represent guard cavalry. This would be some of the last remaining heavy cavalry units from the 1813 and 1814 campaigns led by Etienne de Pommeroux or Jean Pierre comte Doumerc (either of whom sound like the embodiment of complete french-i-ness in their elaborate names.)

Oh well, enough for now and onto the miniatures. I have just taken these images cowering in on my coffee table in the back room worried that the light would wake my infant daughter ... thankfully nothing has happened as yet and some of the snaps have turned out alright (although the 8th Cuirassier that I just poured 2 weeks of painting into didn't photograph too well.)