Form Square! Back to 6mm Napoleonics

I was inspired last night to a spot more work on my Baccus 6mm redcoats. I follow my own basing method with these lads. The little chaps come four models to a strip. The recommended basing method is two strips deep and three wide on a base, with one of those being a command strip (officer, two colour bearers, and a drummer), yielding a group of 24 models. I only use the command strip on every third base, as I have both fond memories of Shako with plastic 1/72 chaps, and a desire to get round to my place the chaps I played this with at uni, and have a few games with the 6mm chaps. In the Shako small-scale rules, an infantry battalion is three stands in size, you see. With the 1/72 models we had representative units of 9 men, and this way there are 72 of the little fellows. I am not quite mad enough to go for 1:1 ratios of men yet! Anyway, I was inspired by seeing Ian's 54mm project, peering at my Sharpe DVDs again, and a chap on Warseer who's making some Napoleonic-themed Imperial Guard. I find it is often the case that I will notice one little thing, which makes me notice something else, and then things snowball!

The weather here continues to be unpleasantly warm, so I continue to imbibe drinks from glasses that are 80% ice cubes. I'm dawdling my way through Millennium, as I paint, and have reached the start of the final season. Rather bizarrely, the world clearly ended at the end of the second season, only for the makers to have been granted a reprieve from cancellation. I fancy a post-apocalyptic season would have been more honest a continuation, but there would probably have been some trouble in having the central character continue to profile serial killers when almost everyone is dead. So it was only a little outbreak of death, and society is back to normal again with a slightly different cast list. Rather amusingly (or jarringly), the makers seemingly realised finally that all their main characters were white, and that they had also got rid of the two major female characters. So there's a new FBI agent added to the mix, who's black. "Pete, I'm not getting what's comic or jarring about this." Ah, just wait. They introduced her in an episode which dealt with lots of blue-eyed blonde clones. To quote Giles of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, " I believe the sub-text here is rapidly becoming... text".

Coming up soon is a week of frenzied activity. Dad is going to be out most of the day at church, as there's some sort of harvest festival thing going on. So I will be taking advantage of his absence to get as much painting done as I can. To recapitulate for those just tuning in: the house needs a bit of painting done, but Dad is a bit of a stickler, and insists on overseeing or painting himself, so won't let anyone else do it. However, he has no time, so he can't do it. Fortunately, we men are not the observant half of the species, and his sense of smell is a bit degraded by years of smoking, so I have been patching up this window ledge and that peeling bit of wood for several weeks now, and have yet to be detected. The main problems are drying times and that Dad is often at home working on church stuff.  Since he's going to be out all week, I doubt I'll be painting any soldiers then, but you might end up seeing some proud pictures of gloss-coated outdoor wood! For the time being, here are those Napoleonic redcoats.