In which I answer some questions, and ask some others, and make random comments.
First off, a thank you to Bill of TMP, for having posted my two blogs onto TMP's news! Also, a thank you of course to Dayton Painting Consortium, for making such lovely figures. I'm now itching to ditch everything else this week and just paint. ;)
Answers to previous post comments:
1) Jeff and Miniwargamer ask what color scheme I'll be using for this regiment. Answer: I'm dithering at the moment. My initial plan was to go with the von Lintzer Musketeers, a solid line regiment with a color scheme of gray uniform, yellow facings. I'm very tempted, now that they're here, to paint up a Guards unit with Andrea Blue coat, gray trousers, and...an undecided facing color. I had white in the initial color scheme I did with the template, but I'm starting to think I'd like a brighter color for the first Guards unit.
2) Regarding undercoating, I'm still debating whether to use the black Plasti-Dip, or go with the white gesso that I recently discovered was in a drawer. :> Two good friends, who've both painted competition miniatures for fantasy each use the opposite color, but a third did give an interesting analysis. If you want your colors brighter, use a white undercoat. If you want them darker, use a black undercoat. Whichever color I go with, I *do* intend to undercoat these. As Jeff observed, I didn't undercoat the warrior frogs. This was a purposeful decision on my part, because I was working with limited time, and the survivability of their paint coat wasn't important to me. I was just using them as test figures to practice painting with acrylics and brush on metal...something I've never done before.
Question for Stokes: What's the pose breakdown of your Grand Duchess' Own regiment? How many figures in a company for your regiment? Do you use one "Officer with Spontoon" per company, or some other division? I counted at least 3 in your original photo of the group layed out.
Questions for all:
1) For the SYW period, what position and rank would one expect for an officer with spontoon, an officer on foot with sword, and a mounted officer? I'm trying to decide what kind of officer mix I want for my regiments.
2) For a multi-battalion regiment, do you typically use a mounted officer for *each* battalion, or only for the regimental colonel?
3) For the SYW period, did Grenadier officers wear the normal tricorn, rather than Grenadier caps? RMS95 only seems to carry the officers in tricorns for Prussians, so I'm wondering if this was the norm.
4) I'm tempted to use one officer with spontoon per company in my regiments, which would give a total of 5 (4 for the line companies, 1 for the grenadiers). Does this seem reasonable? Is it too much? What role did those with spontoons play in the historical regiments?
Additional comments:
Still reading? I'm doing some revision in my thinking on unit sizes, in two areas. First, as some of you had already picked up on, I wasn't realizing that the count of 36 in a bag *included* the command troops. The actual count in my current pack is 28. This means I have 4 leftovers at present, from the Musketeers. At that rate, I won't make 3 battalions out of every two packs, obviously, as I was thinking. Rather, that's 7 battalions out of every 6 packs. So when I have some time, I'll be running some calculations to decide the best way to assemble the regiments I want.
As this doubtless extends to the cavalry as well (anyone have a cavalry pack breakdown?), I may take Alte Fritz's advice, and increase the projected size of my cavalry regiment as well.
I'm seriously pondering ordering a bag of Grenadiers to form the von Platzen Grenadiers, with leftovers going towards the grenadier company of my next line regiment. Incidentally, even though I've been speaking of battalion and regiment as sort of interchangable, I'm planning to have multi-battalion regiments once I've gotten some of the initial battalions underway. With a limited budget, however, I want the change to field multiple regiments first, purely so I can play with the fun paint schemes.
Any other random suggestions, painting tips for a newbie, etc?