'Empire' From RafaelO: The last stand of the Imperial Old Guard (114 points)

Hello everyone!

This year’s Empire Theme Challenge couldn’t have come at a better time for my painting plans, as I’m currently working on a Napoleonic French army.

With the goal of creating a base that represents the Emperor himself and can serve as my HQ for games, I decided to use a painting by Charles Steuben as my main source of inspiration.

Napoleon's Return to France, painted by Charles Steuben in 1818.

To achieve this, I used 12 Imperial Old Guard Grenadiers from the Zvezda 8030 box, along with the Napoleon miniature from Italeri’s French Headquarters set. As a companion to Napoleon, I wanted to include one of his followers wearing a more distinctive uniform: the Mameluke Ali dit Saint-Denis.

The last Stand of the Imperial Old Guard, 1815.

The painting process was fairly straightforward. I applied a white Tamiya spray primer to all the miniatures. Most of the colors come from Vallejo’s Xpress Color range or Citadel Contrast paints. Afterwards, I added a couple of highlights to enhance the final finish.

In summary

12 x 20 mm Infantry models @ 4 points = 48 points.

2 x 20mm Mounted model @ 8 points = 16 points.

plus 50 points by Empire entry

Total 114 points.

Cheers,

Rafa

'Empire' From SamuliS: Saxon Cavalry ready to defect from the First French Empire (104 points)

Finally kicking off this painting challenge from my side as well! Back after a few years hiatus to what I think is my 11th challenge after first participating in 2013! And the first entry now is actually part of a project that I started in the 2015-16 challenge so more or less a ten year anniversary for this!

Starting off the challenge this year is a selection of Napoleonics to wrap up my Saxon army for the 1813 campaign. We were originally planning to play the campaign starting around 2016-17, but after years of heavy Napoleonics gaming we started to move to other interests and the army newer saw the gaming table and some units were left unpainted. Moving forward quite a few years there has now been a renewed interest in Napoleonics at the club with a lot of fresh faces so I decided to dig up the remaining miniatures and paint up a few additional units. Nice change of pace as well to return to 18mm scale as I haven't painted smaller scale in several years despite it once being my main scale with Napoleonics, Flames of War and Team Yankee making up much of my gaming. Miniatures are mostly AB Figures 15/18mm Napoleonics and I suspect at least some of the command figures are Campaign Game Miniatures.

Fitting nicely with the Empire theme as the First French Empire was really on it's last legs in 1813 and throughout the campaigns the disillusioned Saxons (as well as some other French allies) started defecting to the Allies speeding up the crumbling of Napoleons forces. The Leib Kürassiere painted here were the last Saxons to desert Napoleon after the Battle of Leipzig signaling the end of Saxonys alliance with France.

 

 

Unit sizes are quite small as with the ruleset we are now using the units are smaller than we used to play with. Personally I'm not the biggest fan as I like the spectacle of massive amounts of minis on the table when playing big battles with larger units, but it has definitely helped get a lot of newer players into Napoleonics as you don't need to paint hundreds of minis to field a Division of your own. And for me of course it helped speed up the process of painting the missing cavalry units into the army. I'll get around to bringing the unit sizes up to the same as the rest of my collection at some point, but for now I'm all set for 1813. 

 Leib Kürassiere

Prinz Clemens Regiment

 

 Hussars

 

16 cavalry figures in 18mm scale coming in at around 64 points  with another 50 added for the Empire theme.

Next up some Fantasy minis with a return to The Old World!