Keep Your Powder Dry

The annual consumerist festival at the Docklands ExCel Centre is fast approaching, and, cutting a long story short ... the upshot being another eight regiments of horse have been ordered, and four light artillery pieces and crews. Yet more additions to the baggage train (this time from Donnington Miniatures), and a new vignette for the townspeople (inspired by an Easter showing of Cromwell, Fairfax's coffin will be making an appearance). To balance the universe I have set myself a pre-Salute challenge: to finish the current occupants of the painting pile. This means completing two more foot regiments of Covenanters; four more wagons for the baggage train; and four more light limbers. The wagons and limbers can't be finished completely as their drovers (dragoon horseholders) will be waiting for me at Salute. Not too onerous a target, apart from having to drill out the hands of the lowland pikes. Having had a difficult* time doing the first dozen, my technique/productivity

One of the reasons I started this blog was as a repository for all the scraps of paper that constituted my notes/research for this project. This post is, therefore, a blatant example of a note from me, to me. It is an attempt to save myself having to go and measure bases every time I want to order some more. Basing is a bugbear of many gamers: rulesets are often very specific as to the number of figures to bases ratios, and base sizes. I can see the point for competition gaming, or gaming against a number of regular opponents. As I don't do any of that sort of nonsense, and provide both sides, as long as I am consistent there isn't really a problem. All my bases are Warbases premier 2mm thick bases. Sabot/movement trays (2mm top layer) and casualty markers are also from Warbases. Bases are finished using a variety of muddy brown paint/grit mixes, then adorned with Gale Force Nine green static grass. Prettification is courtesy of a variety of tufts from MiniNatur (short tu

The devil is in the detail or so they say. I must have been very bored one day whilst on the old interwebs, or I am the son of Satan. I'd say the former... some may disagree. I managed to pick up a couple of brown leather money pouches from a LARPs seller on fleabay. They weren't expensive and are really well made (they smell wonderful too); they make excellent, atmospheric dice bags. Needless to say, the Parliamentarian  player has orange dice, the Royalist player red. I also picked up orange and red arc of fire templates from Warbases, to complete the theme. Rather than having ugly tape measures I plumped for brass and aluminium measuring sticks from Products for Wargamers . Extravagant but lovely. Red and orange felt folding dice trays from  All Rolled Up  complete my gaming aid sets. If you aren't familiar with All Rolled Up's dice trays, they have a black faux leather outer and a felt inner. A clever combination of poppers allows it to fold flat when n

Caveat: if you want a guide to painting horses that employs 16 shades of the same colour to highlight and lowlight horse flesh look away now. This is a quick and easy average painter's guide to painting horses averagely. I must confess that I am not the biggest fan of horses; I blame having a horse mad older sister, who didn't have a horse but had a little brother she could bully.  So I always used to paint horses as quickly as possible, dark brown, with dark brown manes and tails, and dark brown tack. My token gesture to 'not dark brown' was the occasional white flash or sock. Here is my current horse formula. Well it works for me, and my horses look, well, horse like. Colours: I avoid greys and blacks unless absolutely necessary (commanders being known for only riding horses of a specific colour, or certain Napoleonic cavalry units). So my horses are almost exclusively chestnut , bay or dun . In the seventeenth century there wear superstitions surrounding hor

We all know where a general keeps his armies*, but where do you keep yours? My 6mm Heroics and Ros ECW armies lived in a Cadbury's chocolate fingers tin. Handy, but useless. Probably explains why the pikes looked like over cooked spaghetti. As my 15mm Napoleonics armies grew to silly numbers, storage became an issue. At the time Sally 4th came up with their  Warchests  boxes and lids. Warchests are laser cut MDF boxes which come in kit form. You'll need PVA glue and some elastic bands to assemble them. Easy to assemble, but for some reason I find the 52mm boxes the most tricky, often falling apart during that awkward act of putting the elastic bands on (to hold them together whilst the glue sets). They now come in a number of variations (clear panel, pre-coloured, different sizes, magnetic bases etc). Mine are the basic ones: I use 35mm height boxes for casualty markers and foot figures; 52mm for cavalry, dragoons and artillery; and 70mm for foot regiments that have

As I have little to no patience, I have decided to go the route of drilling hands out to take separate pikes, rather than waiting on the off chance that some open handed lowland pikes would join the range. Drilling the hands out was horrible, the pikes are cast on to bodies, heads and legs (great for casting and stability of the model, but a beast to remove). Completed, and salvaged Scots command - I was a bit heavy handed with the spray varnish. It was time to put paint on pewter and get some Scots ready for the battlefield. With some suitably named paint colours from Foundry: arctic grey, granite, quagmire, moss, storm blue, drab, peaty brown, I was ready to start. Quite like the laissez-faire attitude of the pikemen, some of those positions are not in the drill manual. I decided that my lowlanders would all be wearing hodden grey - although I fancied a mix of greys rather than a uniform shade of grey. The arctic grey and granite are my hodden grey shades, look

Here in Blighty we have had a little bit of weather, a good blast of polar continental air has brought carnage to a nation that feints at the sight of two snowflakes falling on its capital. Here at Château Keepyourpowderdry we have been housebound for three days, with sporadic electricity supply and heating. So as mother nature has plunged us back into the 1950s I've been doing a lot of reading by candlelight. On the occasions when the twenty first century has returned I've been online shopping for books. All I can say is my bank manager is probably very relieved that the council have cleared the 8' deep snow drifts blocking the only road in and out of my village. Littlecote: the English Civil War Armoury by Thom Richardson and Graeme Rimer. A hefty, scholarly catalogue of the Littlecote Armoury, which is now preserved at the Royal Armouries in Leeds. Hardback, monochrome pictures. Update: now back in print! Littlecote in 1705 Part of the Littlecote Collection, displ