Ordering the Ranks

probably no the most exciting post to many, but on a personal note, I'm delighted to be back among my Victrix and Perry Miniatures once again.  Yes, I'm back in the Napoleonic period, putting some more work into my Spanish Peninsular project.  It's been too long.

Why the delay, I hear you ask?  Well, to be honest, I don't really know.  I am planning to make a lot of miniatures for this game, as I will be playing Sharpe practice with them.  It's what I'd call a large scale skirmish game.  I already own the figures I need to play, although they aren't the exact troops represented in The Compleat Fondler supplement.  perhaps the main reason this hasn't happened is due to my own OCD approach to such things.  I want to get the colours right.  This, you will understand, is not easy.  Type a uniform search into your browser of choice, and you'll inariably find a plethora of painting guides.  Now you'd think this to be A GOOD THING, but each urges the reader to use a different colour palette.  Oh, you'll also find people bemoaning the incorrect colour of blue used for French uniforms and so on.  All this is, in my book, rather depressing and off-putting.  Much like the year long debate about NMM (Non-Metallic Metals) I endured over painting Confrontation miniatures a few years back.  That, of course, spelt death to ever gaming the system.  Which was a crying shame, because I painted some of my many figures for that system and had a lot of fun playing it with my go-to gamer of choice.  Because as we both know, gaming with painted miniatures is the main thing and enjoying the painting is the other thing.  Which brings me back to my Napoleonics.

So what if the colour's aren't exact?  Who's going to see them anyway?  It's not like I attend a gaming club or national conventions or anything of the sort.  I personally think it's abut time to paint them so they look good and I can game with them!  I'll make them as accurate as I can, but i refuse to lose sleep over it.

But before the brush can come out, the models need to be made safe.  That means one thing: basing them.  And to be honest, I seem to be doing an awful lot of basing these days, between these, my Zeds (see Tidying Under Zombies Feet)and my WotR miniatures (not had time to blog that one yet!)

Last time we saw these miniatures, they were stuck to Renedra bases, but weren't secured in their Really Useful Box (which, like the proverbial Ronseal, really do live up to their name).  I really love round bases for my skirmish miniatures, and last year I managed to find a really good way of magnetising them for not a whole lot of money (see Going Round in Circles) when I discovered I hadn't gotten round to doing this with my Napoleonics, I decided it was high time to do so.  At which point I discovered I had run out of steel sheet paper.  On Christmas Eve.  So I put in an order with Magnetic Displays and it arrived on 29th.  I consider that to be amazing service indeed.

So the work began.
 Here's a quick reminder of how good the steel sheet is with these magnets.
 Accordng to Magnetic Displays, to of these sheets will fit into a 4L Really Useful Box.  That may be, but I prefer to make them go that little bit further.  So I measure out 20mm squares on the sheet, an d cut them out with a pair of scissors.  I then do my best to stick them to the bx, leaving space between each square as they'll each be holding a 25mm diameter circular base.
 The sheet are 200x150mm square.  The astute among you will ralise you have some 10x20mm bits left, but being an adoptive grippy Aberdonian, I simply stick two of these together to make more squares.  The boxes to one side are for my cavalry figures, which I'll explain in a moment.
 Anyhoo, here's a shot of the dining table ready for the corcular bases to be applied.
 And now we come to the cavalry, the 7th regiment of French Dragoons iin this case from the talented Perry Miniatures.  I confess I had been tempted recently with some oval bases for my cavalry.  However, I soon realised that keeping them on their 20x50mm Renedra bases was going to be ANOTHER GOOD THING!  Back in the day, I used to affix my steel sheet paper to the underside of my miniature bases and attached my magnetic strip to my Really Useful Boxes. When i remembered this, I was delighted to find I still had a significant amount of my 5m roll from Magnetic Display.  And when I saw it was 20mm wide, well, what can I say, I was delighted!
So I decided to fix the base carefully into place, and then cut the tape using the base as a guide.  Perfectly straight every time!  Even if the Dragoon didn't trust me and lay about to one side for the process to be complete!
 The end result:  All safely based and ready for...well, more basing really.  Where did I put that ground mix?  What?  No more super glue?  Honestly!  Right, I'm away to the shops!
 

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