Chatterton's Hill, 1776. Part 3

 // Preparations continue.. //

It is only a week to go until Partizan and my demo game. As I type, the playsheets are being printed out and I have finished the posters and markers for the game.

It has taken me a while to adjust to using my Macbook's native software rather than Microsoft products to produce gaming materials, but I'm getting there now. The posters use the same template at the ones for the last couple of AWI games and were much quicker to put together now I have that extra familiarity.

The markers to accompany each command stand show the commander's essential statistics and those of the units under his command. They are made from 10cm x 5cm plywood ovals to which I glue paper oals that I created on the computer and printed out. To help the two to match the printed ovals have a thick, green fuzzy border and the wooden ovals have their edges painted green. It all seems to work:

Lastly for now, I have renovated some old figures and might use these as the Tory scouts for the demo game. These are not painted as any specific unit, but were inspired by these two pictures from the Mollo AWI uniform book:

The aim was to produce a militia unit with civilian clothes but some attempt at uniformity of colour and achieving a more "military" appearance. I think of these as a rich Tory's "hobby" unit where he has purchased cloth used for coats, waistcoats and sleeved waistcoats, but it is no more plausible than that. I originally painted these figures using various "spares" to provide a small loyalist unit for my Battle of Camden demo for Salute in 2002, meaning I probably painted these in 2001. Yes, a full quarter of a century ago! These are all Wargames Foundry figures. At the time Perry Miniatures were new and had recently released their AWI highlanders but not much more.

This is how the unit looked in all their original glory; not a bad standard for 2001. These were the days before washes, when all us cool kids undercoated black. There are some oddities though, such as musket locks painted brass.

You will perhaps notice that my painting and basing were very similar back then to how they are now. A few things have evolved, particularly tufts 'n stuff, but not so much that any units in my armies are incompatible with any of the others. The ground cover mix I use on my bases is essentially the same recipe now.

I started by soaking the base in a tray of water overnight to soften things up and allow the figures to be removed. These were then stuck to small cardboard squares as temporary bases while I went over the paintwork again. 

The muskets were repainted in my current style, overpainting the original chestnut ink and re-doing the metal in gunmetal and brass. After some internal debate I did repaint the faces. The black areas had a thinned coat of black before re-highlighting. The brown leather was repainted with orange brown and highlighted with light brown before a fleshshade wash. The pale overalls received a "marine juice" type wash before highlighting with pale sand and any powder horns were repainted with buff then pale sand and the metallic areas re-done. The two haversacks were repainted light grey to differentiate them from other pale items.

I left the white shirts as they were and did the same for the blue uniforms...mostly. There were a few spots where the blue was chipped, so I needed to mix up a matching colour...25 years later! I managed to get a close match using dark prussian blue, pale grey and just a spot of black-grey. 

The painting all took a couple of hours and I then started planning how to arrange the figures on an oval base left over from creating the markers. I could just as easily have used small circular or rectangular bases like my other skirmishing units; but I like mixing things up.

Base composition is something I do try to give some thought to. In this case there are four figures loading or firing and two in moving poses. It made sense to group these by activity. Exact placement was also affected by a few rocks that I glued to the base and even after starting to stick the figures down I made a last minute adjustment in placing the chap in shirt and waistcoat who is loading his musket.

Here is the finished base (still needs a bit of last minute dusting a a spray of matt varnish). They aren't the sharpest photos as I look them with a long exposure rather than a macro setting:

I did go a bit "all in" on the flowery tufts, but am pleased with the finished base and think I will use these as the Tory scouts next weekend. This is definitely unit whose appearance belies their lack of quality so they's probably just lurk on a flank. Think of them as the "forlorn hopeless".

That is just about everything sorted for the game. Most items are boxed up and ready to go into the car. One final job will be a grid to count down time as it passes in the scenario. Maybe something to finish up this evening.

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