Chosen Men

I’ve been a fan of Bernard Cornwell books for a long time, and I believe I’ve read every one of his book series apart from his most famous: Sharpe. It’s been on the to read list for a while, but I always held off as I was well aware of the consequences of starting the series. I would get interested in the period, and therefore in wargaming the period, and therefore adding to my ever growing backlog!

As you might have guessed, I finally got around to starting the series and here I am, painting some Napoleonic miniatures. I’m four books in at this stage and tremendously enjoying myself. They’re great adventure novels with a decent amount of historical detail, keeping my attention and prompting me to read more about the elements that stand out to me.

As soon as I realised my fears were realised and there was no turning back from painting musket wielding miniatures I turned to finding a system and scale to play the era in. My first thought was Warlord Games’ Epic Waterloo system, with its large scale battles and mass ranks of 13.5mm scale miniatures. After eyeing off the starter sets for a while I decided to aim for something a bit smaller in scale (miniature count wise) and larger in scale (miniature size wise!). I have enough large model count projects underway for now!

I started looking for skirmish systems set in the era and rapidly settled on two: Sharp Practice by Too Fat Lardies and Chosen Men by Mark Latham and Osprey. Sharp Practice turned out to be a bit hard to get a hold of locally, and seemed quite a bit more complex in rules so I decided to go with Chosen Men (which has rules for bouncing cannonballs! I couldn’t pass that up). I like to have a game system as a framework for my painting as even though I have no plans to play games in the short term, this lets me decide how to build my models and how many to paint.

I wrote two small forces for the game, one French and one English, and the unit you see above is the first for the French side: Napoleon’s fiercest, Old Guard Grenadiers. These models are from Victrix, and quite nice plastics. The set comes with most of the models marching with their muskets upright, but has some firing and reloading poses, and I concentrated on these for this unit as I felt they were more sensible in a skirmish scale. To give you an idea of the size of the game, the French force is 21 models strong and the British 31 models strong, so really that’s half of the French painted!

Painting-wise there’s not too much to write about, the main feature of these models are their blue coats and trousers, which were painted all sorts of shades of blue in paintings and reference materials. I settled on a darkish blue, lighter than a navy blue and slightly desaturated. This was done using a base coat of Vallejo Dark Prussian Blue and a highlight of 50/50 Vallejo Dark Prussian Blue and Vallejo Prussian Blue. The rest of the models were painted much as I paint materials of the same colour. As these are effectively a one-off I wasn’t too careful about writing my steps down.

Anyway these were good fun to paint, and I’ve just received the eclectic mix of models I want to build the British side out of which I’ll assemble and paint the next time the urge hits. Given my so far unbroken Sharpe novel streak this might be sooner rather than later!