One of the tricky things when writing a blog about your progress with painting toy soldiers is you have to actually paint toy soldiers, all the time. Otherwise you run out of things to write about. Forced breaks due to surgery aside I have done pretty well to keep up and publish at least one post a month over the last couple of years which has meant I have been pretty prolific in my painting too. It's nice to get a little break sometimes though, so when my brother-in-law Tom asked if he could hijack my blog to tell the world about his latest project I immediately agreed. So I shall keep the introduction short and pass over to the Distinguished Opponent.
Greetings Acolytes of the Dice Gods, once again it is I the Distinguished Opponent usurping this blog from your usual writer because I cannot be bothered to start my own. Like last time this is going to be a long one so grab yourself a coffee, and if you can, why not get our host one as well, I’m sure he would really appreciate it.
Last time I was allowed to inflict my presence upon you dear readers, I told you the unhappy tale of how I tried to get some skeleton crocodiles from Dark Fable Miniatures but couldn’t owing to the sites owner having recently passed away. I also told you how the owner of Dragon Bait Miniatures delivered the sad news and that he was going to add Dark Fables range to his online store, ensuring that Dark Fables legacy will not be lost to us like too many others. Well at the time I decided to look at Dragon Baits store to see if they had anything I could use for my Undead army. They did not, instead they had a range of minis called Steam Bait that I fell instantly in love with and was determined to have at all cost. The Steam Bait range is women dressed as British soldiers from the late Victorian era. It is clear looking at the paint job on the website that their design was inspired by the film Zulu, lovingly referred to in my family as ‘THAT FILM’. It is easy to understand why with the bright red uniforms and white pith helmets, even Games Workshop was inspired by ‘THAT FILM’ when they created the Praetorian Guards.
Now as almost all of you are understandably unaware of, when I’m not smearing paint on small expensive lumps of metal, plastic and resin I earn my daily bread as a curator in a military museum. This means that knowing the history of British Army uniforms is quite literally my job. Now the quality of the minis sculpts means that either by accident, or design, the minis helmets look like a cross between a pith helmet and a home service helmet. Because of this I decided to paint most of my ladies wearing home service helmets rather than pith helmets. This opened up a wide range of colours that I could use rather than red and khaki. I also came up with names and nicknames for each regiment...Well what do you do to pass the time while waiting for the wash to dry? Let’s talk about the infantry soldiers first.
The South-West Warwickshire Regiment “Shakespeare’s Sisters”
These were the first ladies I painted up. The officer is actually from the rocket artillery set but I pulled her out of that group as I needed her to make up the numbers. The flag came from Maverick Models. They produce many different Napoleonic flags for various scales printed on either paper, stickers or in this case fabric.
The Cambridgeshire Light Infantry “The Footlights”
In case you don’t know, the home service helmet worn by infantry regiments was blue, while light infantry regiments wore green helmets. Like nearly all the minis I painted, I chose to paint the ribbons on the helmets the same colour as the facings (the collars and cuffs). For these I wanted to use Cambridge Blue as the facing colour, hence the regiments name. Unfortunately Cambridge Blue is very close to green in tone and would have been lost on the helmets. To make matters worse I only realised a way around this problem when I was painting the last of my minis.
The Central African Border Regiment ‘The Cabbie Drivers’
Felt I needed a unit from the Empire so I painted these up as African soldiers. The uniforms are Vallejo English Uniform, a paint I am rapidly falling in love with. It covers nicely, dries smooth and is just a lovely colour. Does anybody know if they do a range of Captain Scarlet minis? I really want to paint Captain Ochre using this colour.
The Queens Royal Rifle Brigade ‘The Quick and Slows”
I used the officer and bugler from the command set for these Riflewomen. Worth mentioning at this point I used grey’s and yellow for the metals as I didn’t think true metallic metal paint would work with these figures. I also did the metals as a very basic non-metallic metal as 1) I felt that having anything other than a basic NMM would not look right and 2) I am not very good at NMM.
The Worksop Rifle Volunteers “The Mud Maids”
As I said earlier knowing the history of British uniforms is my job and I could not pass up the idea of having some rifle volunteers with grey uniforms. Once again the officer was pulled from the artillery set to make up the numbers. As for the regiments name, I freely admit that watching Maid Marian and Her Merry Men when I was painting these ones may have influenced me somewhat.
The Isle of Man Regiment “The No Tails”
Decided
to paint these women wearing foreign service dress, as I didn’t want too many
wearing redcoats. I also chose to give
them black skirts to avoid confusion with my African ladies. I was originally planning to paint these
minis as Scots wearing tartan skirts.
Fortunately good sense broke out of its prison and stopped me.
The Berwick-upon-Tweed Regiment “The Boarder Jumpers”
This was the last group of infantry soldiers I painted and I decided to do something a little different with these. Here’s a weird thing about the British Army, there is a rule and there is always one regiment that does not follow that rule, always. In the case of my minis the colours of the ribbons on the helmets always match the colours of the facings. Not these girls, their facings are teal while their ribbons are white. It was after completing these that I realised I should have done this for my light infantry women instead. There was some swearing when I worked this out.
Well that’s the infantry now for the cavalry. Design wise these models resemble the Household Cavalry so I decided to paint half like Lifeguards and the rest as Blues and Royals. The guidon was purchased along with the flag from Maverick Models.. The guidon itself was the same scale as the flag so it was going to be half a centimetre smaller than what I wanted, however when I put my order in I got an e-mail telling me what the final size of the flags was going to be and was asked if I wanted to make any changes before going to print. I get the feeling the owner of Maverick Models has had one too many complaints from people who didn’t measure their flag poles properly or checked the size of a guidon compared to a flag. In my case while I was happy with the original size I chose to increase it, which was done at no extra cost. In short ten out of ten would buy from again. Finally there are no funny names or nicknames for these soldiers as my creativity gave out on me...sorry.
For my rocket artillery batteries I chose to paint them with dark blue uniforms with red facings similar to the Royal Artillery. I chose to paint one battery as a Regular Army team and the other as a Volunteer Artillery team. The way to tell them apart is the volunteer battery’s members wear silver helmet badges while the regular battery’s wear gold. I also gave the members of the volunteer battery grey or greying hair. Both batteries share a single ammunition mule.
Private Alison Sloper.
These are my favourite models in the Steam Bait range. Both the mule and the long suffering soldier have so much character to them. I chose to paint the soldier so she looks like a member of the Army Service Corps, dark blue (on paper in real life it looks black) with white facings.
General Lady Sale and Bob
The last mini to talk about is the general herself. I chose to give her a white mount rather than the brown used with the cavalry minis. Credit goes to my mother for suggesting the name for the general which was too good to not use. This also meant I had to name the mount Bob, it’s not a reference to Blackadder.
So those are my ladies. I cannot deny I had great fun painting these girls and I am still smiling every time I look at them. I have shared some pictures of them on a number of discord servers I belong to and the feedback has been lovely. I feel the best way to close out this entry is to share one of those comments that I feel sums up what this hobby and this blog is all about.
“Any model or item that feels cool or even just vaguely interesting and inspires a sense of accomplishment when finished/used in a conversion is an object that can be collected with pride :)”
