"Les pinceaux de la guerre"

The La Bricole is holding a painting competition. This is a small but growing forum of devotees of the Les Guerres Napoléoniennes. The rules are here and all are invited to compete, the deadline for entry is the 25th January and the final submission has to be in March 31.

Some Prussians

Adolf Northen

Finally got around to painting some troops, getting them photographed and uploaded them to the blog. The last Napoleonics I painted were some French Carabiniers back in March. Now back though and have painted several battalions over the last couple of months. I am planning to do the Warhammer twelve scenario Waterloo campaign over the next two and half years, hoping to finish by June 2015. Not sure about the ruleset yet, but I liked what I have seen so far with the Warhammer Waterloo rules. 

Bone idle you say...Not true

My friend Curt at Analogue Hobbies up there in Saskatchewan, has announced the 2nd Annual Winter Painting Challenge and I suspect it will be quite an event. Last year's contest was well attended but this year promises to be something different. Contestants are flocking from all over the world including Canada, here in New England, the British Isles, the EC and I hear even the Antipodes. Rules can be found on Curt's blog and all painters of honour are invited.

The Blue Puttees-Armistice Day 2011

I try to avoid non wargaming posts, but today is a day that I was taught to commemorate from a very young age. Being a Newfoundlander, my father instilled in me the importance of this date and July 1 (Memorial Day in Newfoundland) to remember and honour the 10% of the Newfoundland population who were killed during the First World War.

Warhammer Waterloo Playtest-The Basics

I decided to have a little go at these new Napoleonic rules. I have tried most of the new sets and these certainly look interesting. I am a new gamer with very little experience, so I am not a good judge of the accuracy of the simulation of real combat as provided by a ruleset. I do however feel comfortable assessing  the clarity of the rules and the ease of applying the mechanic. 

Warhammer Waterloo

I got the Warhammer Waterloo book yesterday. It has been recently half price and all I can really say is wow...........and buy it! The book is beautiful, production values are first class and tons of information. There are 288 pages of full colour beauty. The actual rules take up less then a 60 pages, depending on what you consider as rules. The rules themselves are very well laid out and illustrated with multiple diagrammes (as good as Lasalle). Organization is quite clear.

Off on a Tangent......Yet Again

I believe, I can blame it on painting the WWII figures. They were all just shades of brown and although I used multiple interesting named colours, really when you got down to it they were brown.....yellow brown, red brown, green brown, black brown, etc. I think you get the point!

I was sitting down at the table looking forward to getting back into painting Napoleonics, I have more than a dozen battalions of Prussians to paint. I had a look... pink facings good, but I now realised it was going to be all blue and grey, should I use Prussian Blue or Prussian Dark Blue! What about the purple, red and yellow pots of paint that are sitting on the shelf drying out.

A Long Pause......

I believe this might of been the longest period I have gone without posting to my blog. My last post was in late August, just before I left to go to Montreal to bring my son Simon to University. I was there for 9 days and actually tripled my experience of gaming with an opponent who was not myself. It was a great visit, but alas my abilities as a General still appear to be lacking. It has been flat out since I got back to Massachusetts, and this has been the first I really have had a chance to sit down, upload some photos and write a post. 

Four Months of Work!

I thought I would reflect back on the last 4 months. I decided sometime in May to start a new era, I also was curious about trying to paint a smaller size figure. As you know, I decided to go with WWII in 15 mm. My goal was to be able to host a WWII game at the end of the summer. I had settled on the North African theatre; so I had to do some rudimentary research, come up with an OB and a scenario as well as doing up a terrain and paint the figures and vehicles on both sides. I started painting around mid May.

Tunisian Terrain

For my upcoming WWII game, I had to build some terrain that would simulate the Tunisian landscape. The terrain had to be portable, I am driving to Montreal and we are planning to play the game in a hotel room. I quickly got fixated on something in the mountains in the south western part of the country. I wanted a fairly simple but varied terrain that would not stress our first go at the Rapid Fire rules. I suspect that the North African dessert is pretty featureless and there would not be too many places to hide. The whole process was also a discovery for me in how to model a dessert terrain with some hills. I usually model hills into the terrain tiles, but this was not really going to be an option as the pieces had to be portable.