Great Northern War - Russian Infantry

I have now started on the biggest chunk of my Great Northern War Risk figure painting for Maurice - the Russian Infantry. I've done one test unit already, but my plan is to have at least ten infantry units available. So I now have nine new ones on the go. I did the pikes and basing last night; most of the figures came from my original set, but I constructed one unit from the newer, hard-plastic figures as well. All of the pikemen are soft plastic figures; I have the technique for converting them sorted, so it was easier than trying to coe up with a new one for the hard plastic.

So far I have undercoated them, then given them what amounts to pretty much a full coat in the base uniform colour. Everything else will be painted straight over the top - no dry-brushing, shading or washes.

The blue, and one of the green, units are scheduled to be guard regiments. The rest will be rank and file, mostly in green coats with red cuffs but, as you can see, I have a yellow and red regiment as well, just for variety.

I probably won't get a lot more done on them this week; I'm wargaming tomorrow evening, and I'm at a photographic exhibition opening night party on Friday. However I'm gallery sitting for six hours on Saturday, and not anticipating many visitors, so I will pack up the necessary paints and brushes and spend the day doing as much painting as I can.

More On HOTT 2.1

There's now an image of the full cover for HOTT 2.1, back and front. Whilst the main feature of the front cover is still the magnificently bad illustration HOTT has had since it was first published, with the deformed muscular barbarian, the rear cover includes some sales blurb (which I can't read) and some pictures of games.

So, confess - which of you contributed army/battle pictures to the rear cover?

(I'm hoping that someone has remembered to delete the link to the old Stronghold website that was in the back of HOTT 2.0. Otherwise a whole new generation of gamers are going to get a 'Website Not Found' message.)

Oh, and unrelated to HOTT, a big thank you to whoever gifted me a year's supporting membership on The Miniatures Page at Christmas. I only noticed it today.

HOTT Back In Print

Yes, v2.1 of HOTT is now available. Currently just from Amazon.

In terms of changes it apparently formalises the Warband/Shooter movement swap, adds an optional base-width movement measurement system and includes lots of new army lists. It's also in a larger print, A4 format, so those of us feeling the ravages of age may find that more to their tastes.

So, on the whole, it's probably worth getting only if you're a completist (my copy is on order) or don't currently have a copy.

Cossacks Completed

I finished the bases on my Risk-figure Cossack conversions last night.

I also tried the same basing on a few units of Swedes, just to see how it looked. I'm pleased with the results, so in between painting Russian units I will start on the rest of them.

Cossacks!

I ordered a spare set of Risk figures the other week, from eBay. They came just before I went away last weekend, so I spent idle moments of our break deciding just what to do with them. The figures in my original set are all earmarked as the core of my Russian and Swedish armies, so the options for this set are either to do a third army or expand the current ones. I have decided on the latter - I will use the set to do more Russians and Swedes but it also allows me figures to do some irregular units to support either side. And so it is that I have spent today painting Cossacks.

I put the figures together during the week. Risk has one basic cavalry figure, waving his sword in the air. I decided to make four Cossack units, each one with six figures (as opposed to the eight in the regular units). Two bases would have two figures, and two one figure each. To get round the single pose I decided to remodel half of the figures as lancers, chopping off and repositioning the right arm, then adding a wire lance. I use plastic-coated florists' wire, which sticks to the hard plastic of a Risk figure with ordinary modelling glue very nicely.

In addition I filed the corners off the tricorn hats to make something a little more rounded.

Here are a couple of units before undercoating.

And here are the four units, finished aside from the basing.

You can see the difference between the lance-armed and sword-armed figures here.