1/1er Régiment de Grenadiers à Pied de la Garde

Many times, I have heard reference to the fact that gamers tend to paint the elite units of armies first and only paint the rank and file later. I have tried to control myself because I wanted to paint the Old Guard for sometime. Well after painting 19 battalions of French infantry, I did not feel it unreasonable to reward myself. I have had these Victrix figures sitting around since well before Christmas. They were assembled for me by kind gamer in London, Martin Aaron. I believe I had 5 or 6 boxes to assemble and I just was not keen to do it myself. Way too fiddlely for me to do, so Martin stepped in and did them for me. It was very appreciated and he did a great job.

This 24 figure unit represents the first battalion of the 1er regiment. Martin did a nice job of converting one of the figures to a casualty unit. The Maréchal de camp Baron Petit is a Perry figure, and is an absolutely wonderful cast. The figure is actually their Géneral de division Michel figure, but it was the only one with an overcoat so I used that one from the set. Ignore the extra gold! The Victrix plastics are nice, and I believe their Old Guard set is one of their best, certainly the one with the most marching figures. They are not a match for the Perry plastics though, the detail on the back and sides of figure is just less and the plastic is more fragile. I believe I may have broken off one plastic bayonet with the Perrys, and I broke off 5 alone in these 24 figures, some I was able to repair, some I was not. The flag is also from Victrix, very nice.

The figures were primed white and then I used a new ink I had just acquired for the overcoat. Liquitex has come out with a line of acrylic inks and they are beautiful to use. Their flow characteristics are great, they have a very even spread over white and are relatively inexpensive. I used the Prussian blue, there is a slight sheen that you see with inks, especially if they pool, but my technique easily gets rid of it the the next step. I did dry brush to successive lighter blues on the overcoat (GW Ultramarines Blue and Vallejo Sky Blue). The trousers were done with a wash of GW Enchanted Blue. The black pigmented AP gloss was used. I did not do any drybrush after the AP dip, as I liked the way they came out.

 Maréchal de camp Baron Petit

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