Sunday, February 28, 2016

'Nautical' from MarkO - 'Artillerie de la Marine'

Marine artillery infantry formations were an important part of the French army at Leipzig. Created from previously sedentary naval artillery formations, they fought hard and suffered more losses than just about any other units of the French army. At the start of the campaign they numbered 17,338 men, and at the end just 3,661 were still fit for duty, plus 1700 who had been transferred to other units like the Guard Artillery. At Leipzig their dark blue uniforms and great coats caused the Prussians to mistake them for the Imperial Guard.

In the Order of Battle I have planned for Leipzig, these four regiments will represent the 4 Brigades of the 20th and 21st Division of Marmont's Corp, which were composed predominantly of these troops.

The figures are Victrix Middle Guard figures (with converted plumes as detailed at bottom of this post).


Uniforms were painted with Vallejo Prussian Dark Blue, highlighted with Vallejo Dark Blue.





Here's a picture without the flash, to show the colour of the uniforms in more natural light!



There are lots of grey areas about details of these troops uniform. Possibly they had a mix of Shakos and Bicornes but I left the Bicornes for the officers for my regiments, as I had few spare. Apparently one distinctive feature was that the Shako featured a carrot shaped plume, as shown in the pictures below. 

I decided to do a simple conversion to get the carrot shaped plume, so out came the craft knife and putty. I chopped down the top tassel of the pom pom to make a spike, and then used some Tamiya Putty to make the overall piece into a rough carrot shape. Didn't take too long!



96 figures = 480 points. That should help the points along! I'll reset my points target for 1500.

20 comments:

  1. Been wondering where you epic submissions went. Lovely stuff

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  2. Bloody hell, you don't do things by halves! Jaw-dropping stuff there, Mark, and a really great paint job as well!

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  3. What an absolutely splendid body of men, bravo Sir.

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  4. Great points bomb! Nice looking units.

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  5. Very well executed bombs bomb - I really like the figures

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  6. WOW!!!!! What a spectacular display Mark. Absolutely splendid work!

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  7. Grand points bomb, Mark! That is a nice bit of tweaking to the kit too!

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  8. Now THAT'S impressive Mark. Love em!

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  9. This is incredibly impressive stuff Mark. I really like your simple approach to doing the 'flame' pompoms.

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  10. Holy snapping points bomb! Very impressive!

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  11. Incroyable! Very good indeed, what a point-bomb this is, great work!

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  12. MY GOODNESS thats a lot of troops and they look lovely

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  13. Little points bomb there - that's a whole lot of Frenchies

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  14. need a bog ship to fit that lot on! really nice.

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