The final items for my FIW French

Here are the final pieces in my French and Indian War jigsaw puzzle. The wagon has been sitting around, half-finished for ages, mainly because I hadn't got round to undercoating the horses.

The wagon and horses are from Warbases, and the wagon is really a Gribeauval wagon limber, at least, that is what it said on the MDF sheet. However, I think it will be fine as a support option in lots of different guises, because I am not going to get all nitpicky about whether it is the right sort of wagon or not. Life is too short ..............

The figure with the barrel is a from a pack of Perry AWI metal civilians, so he fits in pretty well. I've painted him so that he looks like he might be a member of the French infantry without his uniform coat. The wagon and horses are from Warbases, who have some rather nice carts specifically for Sharp Practice that I will probably buy at some point. I've got another one of these wagons still not made up. I will probably modify it in some way and not use the cover.

Finally, here is the last part of my Régiment de Guyenne, a Colour Party. These are from the Warlord box set, including the flags, which are on the leaflet in the box. I've got a few figures left over, so I'll hang on to them in case I suddenly have a need for some more 18th century French characters.

So, I am now all ready for the monumental clash of French and British in the great North American wilderness at the end of january. 

Now, on to my next project, which I shall get started on next week, probably.

More from my French and Indian War project for Sharp Practice

I began this project towards the end of 2018, and I wrote about it here. Since then, with a few distractions onto other things, I've finally finished off the rest of my forces for the Sharp Practice day at Bristol Independent Gaming at the end of January.

Here are three groups of fusiliers from the Régiment de Guyenne, accompanied by a Senior Leader, Capitaine Philippe Au Brion (drawing his sword), a Junior Leader , Lieutenant Pierre Lardon (armed with a musket and a sword) and a Musician (drummer).

First, here they are in line, ready to fire;

And here they are in a marching column;

These are all Warlord 28mm metal figures, based on 25mm circular bases and mounted on Warbases movement trays. I chose to paint them in pale grey rather than pure white, because there was considerable variation in the actual colour of the cloth used for French uniforms in this period, and a pale grey-white seems entirely appropriate to me. Indeed, in many paintings you will see that the uniform coats were not actually pure white, and the terms "off-white" and "white-grey" are often used to describe the actual colour. I think that the cloth used was actually made from undyed wool, and you never see pure white sheep.

I am reasonably happy with how they have turned out, eventually, and I will explain why. Now, I don't like to say bad things about manufacturers generally, and this is really a rare gripe from me. However, I bought two boxes of these French infantry at Colours last year and while I have no issues at all with the sculpts, which are great, one box was considerably worse than the other one from a castings perspective. It wasn't just flash, the issue was quite large blobs of superfluous metal on a number of the figures, requiring a lot of work with a knife and a file to get the figures in a fit state to paint. In a couple of cases, the cleaning up was pretty extensive, requiring the use of metal snips to cut off the worst of the extra "growths".

Anyway, moan over. I still have a couple of odds and ends to finish off, including a Colour Party, which I hope to get finished next week.