Thursday, June 19, 2008

Heckenfeur

What ho.

Been having a break from the Victorian military forces this week and have dug out some Austrian Grenadiers from the lead mountain that I painted some samples for quite a while ago. I am cracking on with them at quite a pace and am enjoying the results mightily.

Pictures to follow, as ever.

Recently the Duchess and I went to a crime fiction night at the local “Reader’s Feast” mega chain bookstore. I naturally drank too much (*ahem* – free booze) and made an arse of myself in general, but between spouting off too loudly about this and that I stumbled across a large-format book of Richard Knoetels water-colours. I begged and pleaded nicely enough for the Duchess to dispense cash and I made off with my prize. I was delighted to discover it included a pretty fair selection on the Bavarian army. This has led me to decide that the Minucci regiment looked very smart in their mid-blue coat, buff facings and small-clothes and will thus be my next unit after the Austrian Regiment Arberg gets done.

The Bavarian Cuirassiers illustrated in the same volume look rather tempting also, but I suspect Mr Knoetels’ accuracy* when he’s depicting the lace on the shabraques – what’s that triangular lace thing he’s got going on there?

The strength of the Australian dollar at the moment means another order will be going out to the chaps at RSM/DPC for more bags of their Austrian castings.

In other news, I see that Eureka are gearing up for a crack at the 28mm French Revolutionary Wars market with a young Napoleon and a few Grenadiers storming the bridge at Arcola way back in 1796. Will Eureka be able to get a run in an arena pretty well stitched up by Elite miniatures? Only time will tell, I suppose. They look fairly nice in the pictures on the website, though.

I hope there will be Austrians.

*Has anyone of the nit-pickers out there ever thought of putting out a book. The title could be "Correcting Knoetel" or "Mollo, Knoetel and Funcken: A nit-pickers guide" or even: "What the Ospreys got Wrong". Get to it, nit-pickers; money where mouth is.

4 comments:

Bluebear Jeff said...

I don't care about nit-picking -- I want to see the photos of your new unit.

Good to see you posting again by the way.


-- Jeff

Bloggerator said...

Tonight my lovely, tonight.

The urge comes and goes a bit these days, I have to say. That's kind of why I'm doiing these "Heckenfeur" posts - what would be a pile of little one or two paragraph posts becomes this digest. It's a bit inspired by Phil Olleys' "Broadside".

Der Alte Fritz said...

Yes, the Aussie Dollar strengthened considerably over the past year, just in time to bite me in the tail just as Eureka starts shipping out all of those SYW Saxons and WAS Dutch. Ouch!

Bloggerator said...

I sympathise... but only so far as I am now in the position to finally build monster Austrian and Bavarian armies..!