Recycled Frenchies!

I acquired off Archduke Piccolo today a number of second hand painted 20mm plastic Napoleonic French. The Archduke had recently acquired them himself, but was persuaded to part with them upon receiving appropriate trade goods.

A group photo of some of the French.

Close up of some of the stands.

A command element. there were three stands like this.

The paint jobs on these figures are quite average at best, and the figures have had a rough life - I have been told that they fared badly in the earthquakes - which easily explains the missing paint on many of them! In defense of the figures, they are good enough to put on the table, and Napoleonics are not the easiest of figures to paint. It also looks like some of them were painted with hobby craft paint, which would increase the difficulty in producing a top paint job. By and large, this would have been a fieldable army that hopefully the original painter had fun using.

First I cut them out of their stands. these Voltigeurs will form a skrimish line on each V&B stand.

The figures are largely from the HaT 1808 -1812 French Line Infantry set.

I then start to figure out where the figures will go on their new home.

 I am basing them up for use with Volley and Bayonet, as a way of quickly getting some usable french forces on the tabletop. After the success I had with putting a wash over my second hand WW2 Italians, I was curious to see if I could do something similar with other second hand figures. I present the following for you to judge:

Two French stands without benefit of washing.

The French on the left have received a wash of GW Devlan Mud

Front view of the almost finished stand.

The rear view of the French stand,

Side view. The printed paper flag was washed too!

I followed advice from the Archduke and used ink on the coloured edges of the flag to remove the white cut edge.

The printed flags most likely were sourced from Warflag, and the flagbears were mainly converted musketmen. For the completed V&B stand, I nicked an eagle from an Italeri French Line Infantry flag, (a number of the figures are from that set, and from others too!).

Overall I am very pleased with the results achieved from recycling these figures - and from the looks of it it seems that some of these figures are on at least their third rebasing!  With luck I should be able to get another two V&B bases with command figures on them, and enough figures to do another four.