Skirmish Line in the Trees

    As ever, while I should be focussing on getting a single project ready for the table, I'm instead bouncing around like a crazed grasshopper, but I scrounged a few hours of hobby time and wanted something fairly simple I could enjoy painting in that time, so the two units of 15mm French Voltigeurs, ready sprayed, fitted the bill.

   The figures are from from Blue Moon via Old Glory (I think?) and are, in my opinion, the nicest 15mm Napoleonic sculpts out there. It's just a pity the range isn't a bit bigger. I also had a spare flank company figure from my grenadiers, so I decided to use one of the officers from the command pack and create an extra base - as in a few cases coming up, I'm not sure how this will be used, but it solves the problem I'm starting to have with 15mm of the spare figure.

   As ever, I apologise for my photography, 15mm isn't my friend for close up shots.

   Sadly, I'm now waiting on a back order for the rest of my French troops - I gather Old Glory UK ships over figures in bulk, so I'm waiting on the next shipment - which means I'll spend a bit of time painting the other side while I wait for the rest of my order to arrive.

   However, this gave me an opportunity to look at another recent purchase. One of the things halving my scale has done, is it has meant most of my scenery now looks a bit daft next to these new figures, so I'd been on the hunt for ways to bulk up my scenery collection fairly cheaply.

   The roads in the top photo are part of a big set I bought from eBay and are better than I imagined they could be, so I'd tempted to buy a few more just to make sure I always have enough matching roads. Then I got an email from Warlord games saying they had partnered with The Model Tree Shop and were offering their N Gauge tree collections as scenery for the Epic ACW range. Now, I've bought loads of trees from them in the past for my model railways, so I knew they would be good and I put a basket or two together but didn't know how many trees I would realistically need, then it dawned on me, I had loads of Warlord medals to use up. . . Two heavily discounted boxes later and I was on my way.

   24 trees has made me 10 bases of various densities and I've painted an over sized base without any trees on that I can put the clumps on during a game to represent wooded areas and move trees off as figures move through. I plan to paint another couple of big bases so I can have 3 big woods, and I have since placed a little order with the model tree shop for 2 or 3 small bases worth of trees just to keep the numbers up.

Thanks for reading and sorry for the terrible photography