10mm Napoleonic French Bases

A few weeks ago, I bought a few bags of Napoleonic 10mm from Pendraken, to make single test units for infantry, cavalry and artillery, plus a command base. There is a previous post that discusses this and the thoughts behind how the basing should look (link in the Resource Section below).

A main thrust is to try and get some benefits from speed painting, relying on the ‘three foot rule’ to get armies painted and to the table quickly. 

In that post I discussed basing options and showed the infantry unit painted up and based. 

This post concludes things by showing each of the test units all fully painted up and based for further consideration.

All these figures were glued to bases before painting, something that I have never tried before and thought would be much harder to do than it was. It actually helps with the discipline of speed painting.

As a reminder of the infantry side of things, here are a couple of shots of the Austrians in line and column. They are on 40mm x 20mm bases, with 12 figures to the base, so that is 36 figures to the unit, which I think is enough ‘heads’ to get an okay look.

The unit is double flagged simply because I bought 1 bag of everything and by using a 36 figure unit, I ran out of infantry and so had to use extra command figures to get the third base. As this project continues, that second command base will just move to the next unit, to be replaced by 12 standard infantry.

Next up I did the artillery. I am aiming for roughly using a figure pack per unit and since you get 3 guns and 12 crew in a pack, all three guns and crew have been used to  represent a battery. This single base is 80mm x 40mm and I like the effect. It looks like a deployed battery. I think it best to represent limbered artillery with a separate base of horse pulled guns. At this scale, it not particularly an issue to have enough limbers.

For cavalry, you get 15 models to the pack and here 14 have been used in two lines of 7. The standard bearer is front centre, but I have not yet decided yet what to put on that pole. These are Austrian dragoons in the colours (blue facings) of the 6th Dragoons, based on a single 80mm x 60mm MDF base.

To help the speed painting, I adopted something that a poster at Lead Adventurer Forum (thank you) described as ‘wet painting’ for the horse. For this, I kept the brown paint quite wet so that as I slopped it on the horses, it pretty much went everywhere it needed to for fuller coverage. This is hugely helpful with pre-based horses.

Setting aside figure prep (easy), basing, priming and then later adding basing paste and flocking which are fairly fixed in terms of time spent on them, the actual painting of the cavalry unit took just 1½ hours, which I am pretty impressed with and I think the overall effect (3 foot rule) is fine.

Finally there is the command base, these are generals and they have been put on a 40mm circular base, which I feel looks too big, but I like the bigger base for senior command and I think the real problem here is not the base size, but that the figures have been spaced too far apart.

It might be a scale thing, but I note that all of these bases look nicer to the eye than they do via the camera.

Anyway, it occurs to me that 1 base of cavalry, artillery and infantry already done, this is half way to a Neil Thomas style force in his ‘One Hour Wargames’ system and so for the little effort of 3 more infantry bases (3 packs of infantry at the cost of roughly £21) that a usable Austrian force would be complete.

For my own tastes, I would see that as stage 1 of a Pocket Army, with a later doubling of it to reach a stage 2 size that essentially gives a 12 unit army, possibly a sweet spot for many.

So there we are. Will I complete it - well, I thought more than likely I would, but not just yet. However, at the recent Partizan show, I was quite taken by that 4’ x 4’ self folding terrain board made from a re-configured wooden pasting table that Martin from Peter Pig had brought along and perhaps that might make a nice self contained project.

I have seen similar boards used at the last two Phalanx wargame shows used with 6mm armies (a Napoleonic and an Ardennes WWII game).

But of course as always, there is a lot of good stuff that is competing for immediate attention! I am looking at getting the Wagram board game to the table, having a trial or two of the Blood Red Roses rules that I bought for 28mm Wars of the Roses, painting the 9 x 28mm French Napoleonic Voltiguers started a few weeks ago, completing the 3 table corps game and keeping my hand in with the Advanced Squad Leader situational exercises. All are on the immediate horizon.

Resources

The previous post that introduces plans for 10mm basing styles. LINK

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/search/label/10mm

My sister webspace ‘COMMANDERS’  showcases the various figure and boardgame systems that I am enjoying and gives a flavour of where current projects are up to. Link.

https://commanders.simdif.com