Sunday, January 9, 2011

Brown and Grey, and Blue - Besides...

No I have not suddenly turned into Peter Frampton. ;-)

Rather I have begun painting. The artillery park and the skirmishers arrived yesterday, along with Marshall Ney.

Napoleonic Austrians are definitely not all white. There's all those colourful unit facings ;-)

Actually Grenzers and Jagers are not white at all, but brown and grey, and blue besides. So for that matter are the artillery crew, they do have white paints though.

I have discovered a couple of new bits of knowledge concerning Napoleonic Austrians. The first is they had a terrible record. Could this be due to wearing high visibility white uniforms? Second the artillery included a large proportion of Handlangers whose job it was to manhandle the guns. They wore the same uniform as the gunners, but with light blue instead of red facings. Get how I am painting all those guys with trail spikes? The third thing I have learned about austrian artillery concerns painting them. My ochre paint stinks! Really. It is an old bottle Polly-Scale model railroad colour and it has a distinct aroma.

I also realized I forgot to order extra guns to place behind the limbers. Not a big problem, a 4-horse limber eats up enough base size as is, I can always place a gun base turned backwards behind the limber base. Much though I love impedimentia I am not ordering amunition wagons, etc - yet.

Still looking forward in anticipation to the arival of infantry and cavalry....

1 comment:

  1. Landwehr are a different shade of grey to Jagers just for a difference :-), there are also some colourful Freikorps.

    The Austrians get a lot of bad press in wargames circles, as despite all those "momentous" defeats they came back at the French time and again - which implies to me there was some exaggeration of victory.

    Secondly, they were the first to show Napoleon could be beaten on a major battlefield, and thirdly they covered the 1812 retreat very well.

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