Christmas in Safi?

LCVP and crew

 That's the plan, at least.

LCVP and LCM III - both by Frontline

These landing craft are on the one hand cheap, and on the other a bit rough and require a bit of sanding and filling to bring them up to a decent standard before painting them. Recommended on the whole.

 Gunners. More are in preparation; I am waiting on more Raventhorpe heads to arrive here.

 About two-thirds of a battalion of Tirailleurs du Maroc. I need another ten and the batallion staff. Getting there quite quickly. The twenty figures here took only a week to plough through.

 The odd red chechiy'ya is left uncovered for effect. Very dashing!

 And of course, Pook's carbineers. I will be starting to prep up another ten light cavalry as my next batch for painting.

Ye Horse

 Stand fast! They're more scared of your pikes than you are of them! In hommage to Mr Gilder, I'm preparing my own King's Lifeguard of Horse.

 The Cuirassiers thunder pasw, trailed by their lesser bretheren.

 Colonel Pook? perhaps. He's a Hinchcliffe one-piece casting. I rather like one-piece cavalry. Quite easy to deal with. Now I think of it, I really ought to do a Peter Young tribute figure. Is that an assasin levelling his piece at the Colonel?

The horde. 29 figures. MAny pin-swords and minor bits of animation in the form of head-twists and arm-bends. This is a fairly ticklish business with the hard white metal used in the casting, but I am relieved to report that I've not yet had any breakages. I have another few in the stash which I'll get sorted out before I make another order to Hinds'.

Pooks' Horse

The Lord of Hosts!

 Sir Samuel Pooks' Regiment of Horse. Pin-swords, bravely aloft.

All are standard Hinchcliffe castings, which range is fortuitiously being recast at this time. Good show, Mr Hinds. The only changes I made were to replace the cast swords with beheaded pins and a little animation of the castings with a pair of pliers whose jaws I padded up beforehand so as not to mark the castings.

For the most part I painted these with acrylic washes over the best white undercoat I could get onto the figures. A little lining in was done, just to tidy the shapes up. The metals were 1:1 black and GW mithril silver that I later gave a quick flick with a dry-brusk of plain mithril silver to catch the edges on their pots.

I so had to restrain myself from adding the little red hoops on the arms of the figures. Maybe another regiment.

I'm still looking for a design to paint onto Pook's trumpeter, and there are a few spots where handling has rubbed away the paint. The washes are really quite delicate like that. I found I needed to do an intermediate coat of varnich to protect the figures as I finished up the painting!