At last an update..... 15mm Blue Moon armies.

It's been a long time since I went three weeks between updates to this blog. Fact is that I felt that I needed to post something other than images of small groups of figures representing a weeks painting so have held off until I have something more substantial to add here.

The Blue Moon 15mm Napoleonics continue to be my main focus, and I have been knocking them out around 30 to 40 figures per week, thus the collection has grown to close to 350 painted French and British. This is turn has raised the issue of the need to multi base them and what you see below is the French army based in 4 foot or 2 cavalry on hand cut 30mm square card bases, true old school style! These will all be textured with filler/glue mix before earth colouring and the addition of static grass. I have just started on the British, you can see some Light Dragoons and Guards below.

Unit sizes - these are flexible, but I have organised into units of 12 foot or 6 cavalry for the small table games I intend to play. This gives a better impression of mass I find, maybe 12 figures are not representative of a battalion, but then are 24 figures or even 30 figures? I still intend to use a (subtle) grid as I can't get my head around playing any other way these days, the frontage of the units is 90mm so a 100mm square grid will be required, which leaves plenty of depth for terrain features.

On the subject of terrain, I have now painted the items I ordered from Steve Clay at Battlescale. These are all 10mm scale but fit very will with 15mm figures. I gave them a generic paint job, maybe a touch Ballamory in my choice of render colours but pleasing to my eye. The bridges and artillery earthworks are very nice models too. As said before they are very robust resin castings - survived the journey to Spain in the post with no problems - and there is little if any sign of air bubbles that can spoil the look of a model building. They also remarkably inexpensive in the days of costly MDF kits, excellent as they may be, so well worth a look by any wargamer.

My copy of Bob Cordery's latest book 'The Portable Napoleonic Wargame' arrived yesterday and I hope to start reading it later today. I really like Bob's choice of cover picture as it very evocative of Wargame books of the Seventies and works well with the solid bright red frame.

So next I need to focus on basing and terrain, the end of the beginning is in sight and I'm remaining true to my concept of a small space (portable?) Napoleonic wargame system based on a subtly gridded board, albeit one that has outgrown the original C&C board idea.The board will now be 3' x 4' and sit comfortably on my dining table It's coming together slowly but surely, I don't plan huge armies, just up to 20 elements per side, and with the French and British about done I'm turning my attention next to a Prussian Army using the Blue Moon figures.